Population Media Center

Ioana Literat, 2009

During the month of January 2009 I interned at a media organization in South Burlington (Shelburne) called Population Media Center. I was very much interested in the type of work this organization does, because during the spring semester I will be completing my honors thesis on the use of entertainment-education for positive social change in developing countries, and this is exactly the field that PMC has been a pioneer in for the past 10 years.

Specifically, what PMC does is engineer partnerships between local broadcasters (producers, actors, directors, writers) in developing countries and stakeholder organizations like the UN, UNFPA, EngenderHealth, Amnesty, the Gates Foundation etc – who provide the necessary funding – in order to produce social content radio and television dramas that tackle critical issues such as reproductive health, gender violence, literacy, family planning, and so on.

The process starts with a comprehensive formative research, identifying the social issues that are most relevant in the country selected, and which can vary from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sudan to child labor in The Philippines to abortion rights in Brazil. Then, PMC comes up with a detailed proposal, which includes the outline of the project, the issues of concern and a preliminary budget and sends it to organizations working in the respective fields. They have a huge database of sponsors and donors, so they are able to direct their proposals to the ones that are most likely to support such projects, or that have financed similar initiatives in the past.

After the proposal has been approved, the country directors (PMC has overseas offices with local staff in each of the countries it works in) begin the recruiting process, and then train the selected writers in the Sabido methodology, which is the core of the entertainment-education approach. Specifically, this methodology, developed by Miguel Sabido in Mexico in the 80s, addresses critical social issues by integrating them into long-running radio or television series, whose storylines are purposefully crafted to reflect choices and consequences surrounding controversial or grave issues. The method makes use of positive, negative and transitional characters, whom the audience can get build a personal relationship with over the course of the series, to send out positive messages that aim to stimulate behavioral change. For instance, in a series about female genital mutilation in Ethiopia, the mother of the main character starts out by being a fervent proponent of FGM, but once she sees the adverse consequences this procedure has had on girls’ health in the community, by the end of the series, she decides not to do it to her daughter and to raise awareness within her village about the possible risks of the procedure. Thus, a pillar of this methodology is its long-running serial format, which permits a deeper audience involvement and, due to the series’ consumption as part of the audience’s daily routine, is more efficient in encouraging positive behavioral change.

Finally, each radio or television project is followed by a highly comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation, assessing its efficiency as a tool for behavioral change. This evaluation is adapted to the nature of the project, but it usually involves a statistical survey of listenership/viewership, an assessment of the knowledge acquired as a result of the series (e.g. how many listeners vs. non-listeners now know that you have to use a condom not to get AIDS, etc), and various interviews and focus groups, which often contain unconventional assessment strategies, like pictorial feedback (with “before” and “after” drawings). For specific series though, PMC also collaborates with health service providers and community leaders to measure the direct impact of the program. For instance, following a program on family planning in Nigeria, new users of family planning services had to fill out an on-site exit survey at the clinic, indicating what prompted them to seek out these services – in this case, for example, more than 60% of the clinic visitors indicated that it was PMC’s radio program that motivated them to come to the clinic.

In my capacity as intern, I mostly worked in the research department and the communications department. Actually I don’t know if I should even refer to them as departments, because the whole staff at the Shelburne HQ was 8 people in total, so I was working directly for the Research Director and the Director of Communications. For my research responsibilities, I compiled reports about the situation of various social issues in the countries that PMC is currently expanding to (Sierra Leone, Fiji, Nicaragua), for the formative research component used to assess the specific needs in each country. I also researched possible donors, and the humanitarian work that they have done in this area in the past, helping to identify possible recipients of the proposals I helped draft.

For the communications department, I wrote a large number of articles and reports for the web, as well as for PMC’s internal and external publications and newsletters, an activity which I thoroughly enjoyed because it familiarized me with the ins and outs of the production and evaluation processes. In order to write these articles, I had to read country reports from the overseas directors, interviews with the writers, focus group assessments, episode scripts, qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and so on, providing me with an inside look at the application of the Sabido methodology in practice.

Making use of my video editing skills, I also digitized some footage and reorganized their video library, preparing to make a promotional video that they can show to possible sponsors, which is a long-term project that I will complete along with my thesis in the spring. This proved to be very valuable help for them, because they had been looking for someone who could do this, since it will help them a lot with securing funding, and they have a lot of very poignant footage from the countries that they work in, which will surely give sponsors a good idea of the kind of work they do.

I think I performed really well during my internship – everybody really liked me and they were very very thankful for my help. Since the staff at the HQ is rather small and therefore have a lot of responsibilities, they were very pleased to have some extra help, and were thoroughly impressed by the quality of my work, praising my writing and my research skills. I am also very satisfied with my performance, because I feel I have been given the chance to put my best skills to use, and I do think that my writing and research skills are among my strongest points. At the end of my internship, they organized a little goodbye party for me, which was very impressive and touching, and they had cake for me, and gave me a nice gift and a card (which they had written in Romanian!!! so sweet!) which made me really really happy. They also said we will keep in touch and that I should let them know if I need a job after graduation, and that they will help me out with the research for my thesis. They said I can use all their documents and reports and I now have access to all their program evaluations, scripts, proposals, reports etc, which will undoubtedly prove to be an enormous advantage in writing my thesis, since PMC is the only organization in the U.S. that does the kind of work I am writing about.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.