Gateway to Health Communication & Social Marketing Practice

About The Gateway

Welcome to CDC's Gateway to Health Communication and Social Marketing Practice! CDC and its partners have many resources available to help build your health communication or social marketing campaigns and programs. Whether you are looking for tips for analyzing and segmenting an audience, choosing appropriate channels and tools, or evaluating the success of your messages or campaigns, it's all here in one place!

The site takes information from CDC and other public and private resources, and creates distinct categories, making it easier for you to find exactly what you need. The categories include:

Audience

How to identify, segment, select, and target audiences to tailor your health messages to reach your intended audiences.

Campaigns

A thorough list of CDC and other health campaigns, plus other health communication materials and interventions, where you can find "best practices" and interventions that really work.

Research/Evaluation

Where we place formative and summative research plus evaluation tools for health communication programs.

Channels

How to help you determine the best avenues for distributing, delivering, and promoting your outreach strategy.

Tools & Templates

Where you can find templates and social media and health literacy tools, among others, to help you create effective and successful campaigns.

Risk Communication

A special section where you can learn about the principles of risk and crisis response, CERC, and issues management during emergencies.

Health Communication & Social Marketing Essentials

An important part of the site is Health Communication and Social Marketing Essentials. This section gives you step-by-step advice on developing a social marketing campaign, focusing on the tool CDCynergy Lite, which is a new product based on the social marketing edition of the CDCynergy program. Divided into sections on Problem Description, Market Research, Market Strategy, Interventions, Evaluations, and Implementation. CDCynergy walks you through the complete process of developing a social marketing plan. Everyone can find something to use in this tool, whether they are new to the field or experienced.

We Want Your Feedback!

One of the major goals for the Gateway for Health Communication and Social Marketing Practice is to create a place for collaboration and communication among professionals in the field. Whether it is sharing a campaign or communication strategy that has worked for you, or having the opportunity to ask others in our profession their insight or opinions about a particular topic or interest, we hope you will find the Gateway a place you can quickly find out what you need to know. To accomplish this, the Gateway has two sections designed for you to tell us your success stories, or ask questions regarding health communication and social marketing.

Success Stories

Here you can read about what other health communication and social marketing professionals have done in the past. We will highlight full campaigns and insights about particular topics, such as analyzing audiences, finding the right tools and channels, and research tips. On every page of the major sections, there is a section entitled "Success Stories" that will allow you to contact us and tell us your successes. Periodically, we will highlight a particular success story in the Top Flash on the Home page.

Gateway Blog

The Gateway Blog has been designed to be a place where we will provide answers to your specific questions about social marketing and health communications, and allow us as professionals to engage in discussion on particular topics. We plan to have a "question of the month," and will alert you when a new question has been posted. You can leave your comments or suggested questions on the blog page itself, or ask your questions at cbq9@cdc.gov.

Please Join Us!

You can sign up to receive email alerts when we post new information on the Gateway. Please go to CDC's Get email updates box, located on the upper right nav, and enter your email address to sign up for the Gateway for Health Communication & Social Marketing topic. If you previously signed up for updates from CDC's former National Center of Health Marketing or the blog Health Marketing Musings, you are already signed up to receive updates.