Laura Bowen
The Challenge
Home visiting professionals play a crucial role in supporting families and children, yet they often face challenges in effectively communicating the benefits of home visiting services to families and to people who could refer families to home visiting, like medical professionals. There are multiple different types of home visiting programs, each with their own requirements and structures, making universal information and understanding challenging.
First 5 Santa Barbara County serves as the lead of a tri-county initiative to create a sustainable and unified system of home visiting services for families in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties. The partners set a goal to streamline and coordinate their communications and outreach efforts, and promote shared learning and capacity building across the home visiting workforce in all three counties.
How can we help more families access the home visiting support they deserve?
The Approach
In 2024, VIVA was engaged by First 5 Santa Barbara to help launch a professional focused awareness campaign promoting home visiting, and produce materials for home visiting workforce development efforts. Our communications firm embarked on a multi-faceted project to develop resources that would empower home visiting professionals with tools to increase collaboration, partnership, and community outreach.
- Focus Groups: We organized focus groups with home visitors to gain insights into their communication challenges and gather ideas for supportive tools.
- Resource-Rich Website: A user-friendly website, centralcoasthomevisitors.org, was created, featuring a resource library and a training calendar and training menu to provide easy access to professional development materials and opportunities.
- Creating Communication Materials: We designed bilingual posters and flyers tailored for families and medical professionals to effectively convey the value and benefits of home visiting services.
- Producing an Explainer Video: An engaging explainer video was developed in English and Spanish to succinctly illustrate what home visiting entails and its positive impact on families and children.
The Impact
This comprehensive approach to developing communication and professional development tools for home visitors was a valuable step in the partners’ work to help home visiting professionals to advocate for and deliver their essential services to families and children.
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