We Tell Stories
Stories capture the dynamics of everyday life, offering the opportunity to reach people on a deeply personal level. Our stories are grounded in social learning theory, and include positive characters who are rewarded, negative characters who are punished, and transitional characters whose experiences embody the difficult choices we all face in everyday life. Over the course of a broadcast, the audience bonds with these transitional characters and, as a result, they begin to emulate the positive behaviors included in the stories. Learn more

We Create Change
The shows PCI-Media Impact develops portray people’s everyday lives. Each dramatizes the problems people struggle with, and models functional strategies and solutions to them. This broadcast approach succeeds because it motivates people to make personal choices that improve their lives. Field tests of the impact in diverse cultural milieus verify its power to create healthier lifestyles. Learn more

The Power of Partnership
We work with local organizations to produce, air, and sustain programs with health and poverty messages, and facilitate the dissemination of these programs as widely as possible. The thousands of hours of programming we have produced has improved the health of and alleviated poverty for millions of underserved people in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

PCI-Media Impact is a leading provider of technical assistance to governments, non-governmental organizations and foundations working on media campaigns (television, radio and research) with a social marketing dimension. Learn more

Measuring Our Impact
From our founding, PCI-Media Impact has used research, monitoring, and evaluation to refine and evolve our programs to best meet needs of those whom we serve. Formative research is used to identify the target audience’s educational needs, cultural beliefs, realities, and barriers to change. This information enables us to propose clear objectives, indicators, outcomes and outputs, and a plan for monitoring change and impact evaluation.

For example, studies of PCI-Media Impact’s radio serial drama, Taru, which focused on reproductive health and women’s empowerment, indicated that the show achieved impressive results in its target communities when it aired in 2002. Due in large part to the broadcast of the show in the northern state of Bihar, India, four villages experienced dramatic increases in the sales of condoms, oral contraceptive pills, and pregnancy testing devices, with increases reported in the 200% to 600% range. Learn more

Effective Media Delivery
PCI-Media Impact knows that different groups of people respond better to different forms of media. This is why our programs have ranged from national-scale television and radio shows, to grassroots community radio initiatives, to partnership programs with education ministries. We strive to create programs that best engage the target audience—not “one size fits all” initiatives, but comprehensive communications strategies tailored to the needs and concerns of those whom we serve.

Documenting Results
Many PCI-Media Impact programs have been studied by independent, university-based researchers looking at the effects of social content radio and television soap operas on listeners and viewers. These impact evaluations complement PCI-Media Impact's own evaluation efforts and inform our work on other programs. Numerous research papers demonstrating the effectiveness of PCI-Media Impact's approach have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Learn more

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