Why we need to change behaviours
Across the world, millions of people are not reaching their full potential because they lack the knowledge to improve the lives of themselves and their families, or because they are not sufficiently motivated and incentivised to adopt behaviours that will achieve the same set of results.
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For example, in 2015, 1.8 million African children died before their fifth birthday from diseases that can be treated by simple, widely available interventions. Many could have been saved if their parents had recognised the symptoms or the severity of these diseases, and took their children to a health facility.
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This can be modelled. DMI has worked with leading scientists to predict how many lives can be saved by changing behaviours through media campaigns. We predict that media campaigns alone can reduce child mortality by up to 10%, more cheaply than almost all other health interventions.
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Our approach to changing behaviours
Saturation. We apply a basic but frequently forgotten principle of commercial marketing: saturation (reach and frequency). Media campaigns are only effective if they reach the majority of the target audience, even in remote areas, and reach them often enough to drive home the key messages and calls to action.
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Science. Media campaigns will only be seen as legitimate interventions if they can show impact. Until recently there was little evidence that media campaigns change behaviours. We have run the first randomised controlled trial to prove that a media campaign changed health behaviours in a developing country.
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Stories. We cannot change behaviours if we do not conduct research to understand the values, motivations and concerns of our target audience. Media campaigns should be simple, funny, and engaging, convincing people to change their behaviours, rather than simply providing information.
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Our activities
Research. We design and run large-scale research studies to generate evidence that mass media campaigns can change behaviours in developing countries.
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Implementation. We design, run and evaluate media campaigns at scale, often in a single country but also in multiple countries through our 'DMI Reach' capability.
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Consulting. We help other organisations to design, run and evaluate media campaigns by providing them with bespoke advisory and consulting services.
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Independent audits of DMI's impact
GiveWell has ranked DMI as one of the most high-impact, cost-effective non-profit organisations in the world.
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DMI earned the maximum grade of three stars for each quality component of the impact audit: (i) quality of evidence; (ii) quality of monitoring systems; and (iii) quality of protocols for iterative learning.
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DMI is on a list of highly effective charities drawn up by a panel of experts for The Life You Can Save. The Panel aggregates the best research from outside sources and adds additional scrutiny to decide which charities to include.
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Our partners and funders
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Films about DMI
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Why DMI? DMI's CEO, Roy Head, describes how DMI was created to bring together the very different worlds of media and science, and how it has the potential to save many thousands of lives.
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Changing behaviours. Everything that DMI does is based on changing behaviours. To do this, we combine field research with creative techniques. This film shows that process at work in Burkina Faso.
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The science. What is the science that underpins DMI's work? How many lives can we actually save? What is a DALY? Professor Jimmy Whitworth, Dr Richard Horton and Roy Head present the key concepts.
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