Implementing Strategic Communications Planning in a Large Federal Agency
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionHow the world communicates has changed fundamentally since the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Public Affairs Management Manual and its HHS Publications and Clearance process were created in the mid-1980s (ASPA/HHS, 1986). These changes, along with the Department's evolving needs, provided an opportunity for the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs (ASPA) to implement a significant innovation in communications process - one that can support better the Department's overall mission.Since 2012, ASPA (with its many HHS communications partners) has been engaged in planning, implementing, evaluating and improving this new process for handling the Department's print and digital communication products, and for integrating it with the Department's activities as a whole. As an official for HHS' National Institutes of Health put it, implementing this innovation is the way we think as well as reshaping a number of long-standing activities.The old process required advance clearance of print/web publications, audiovisual products, communication contracts, and campaigns, using a set of forms well-known within the Department (HHS forms 615, 524 and 524A). The innovation whose implementation is discussed here is called Strategic Communication Planning (SCP). It incorporates wellvalidated principles of strategic planning and communications science (see Weber and Backer, 2012).The process used to implement SCP also is innovative, especially for a Federal agency. It is based in the same science that helped shape SCP. A fundamental principle from this science is that successful change requires an intensive effort over time to involve those who are affected by the change in designing how it is implemented. HHS undertook several previous efforts to update its clearance process. These didn't work well both because they only involved change around the margins (e.g., putting the clearance forms online but not changing their content), and because they didn't engage the HHS component agencies and their leadership. The implementation approaches used with SCP are based in part on earlier work at one of HHS's organizational units (Weber and Backer, 2012).The process of change in Federal agencies too often involves only sending out a memo followed by a very short implementation period. For SCP's implementation there was an intensive effort to involve those affected by it in the design of the change, and this process took place over a two-year period. Moreover, SCP pushes down decision making to lower staff levels wherever possible, again increasing engagement. An unintended consequence of this strategy is a dramatic reduction in the number of products submitted for review.Finally, communication technology recently has revolutionized how government can engage public audiences (service recipients, their parents and family members) and professional audiences (providers, policy makers, payers, educators, researchers, advocates, media). Now, traditional media (broadcast, print and news) and digital media (websites, social media, media monitoring and metrics, mapping, video/multimedia, mobile messaging, and emerging technologies) provide many options for content development, delivery, promotion, audience engagement and evaluation. These changes are part of the context for innovation discussed here.The Challenges of Implementing SCPSince the previous process was in place more than 25 years, implementing the new one meant dealing with some challenges, both technological and human. The technological challenges involved creating a web-based SCP platform HHS staff could employ for recording and using data about print and digital communication products, and the steps by which they are created and disseminated. While this work was complex and took time and resources, the platform now is up and running successfully. Data have been gathered about both the implementation process for this platform and its initial impact on communication products and their use (see below). …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it