Guiding Principle 2
Develop Culturally Competent Communications
Culturally and linguistically responsive communications strategies improve the relevance, resonance and reach of project materials.
Introduction
Focusing resources to better understand and meet community needs
Ensuring access to culturally and linguistically responsive public health resources for all individuals is a critical strategy for achieving health equity. Often, public health does not translate informational resources into languages and dialects, limiting people’s ability to make informed choices for themselves and their families. Communities work to fill these gaps by creating new resources, opening access, and bridging support to reach families.
Cultural and linguistic responsiveness encompasses much more than translation, requiring attention to literacy and health literacy levels, oral vs. written or visual traditions, and how communication styles differ across cultures. Even within communities and among speakers of the same language, people hold multiple intersecting identities that may inform how they respond to specific communication strategies.
Advancing health equity video series guiding principle 2: Culturally and linguistically responsive communications strategies improve the relevance, resonance and reach of project materials. Watch more community stories.
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Discover Three Strategies Below
Dive into a slice of Guiding Principle 2 below, which includes 3 strategies, from our Community Guide to Advance Health Equity to expand your skills in building culturally and linguistically responsive communications strategies and materials. Explore stories and examples in the full Guiding Principle 2. To learn more about how to develop culturally competent communications, explore snapshots of the 3 strategies below.
Strategy 1:
Tailor message content, mediums, and messengers to communities
Communities may have a wide range of preferred communication styles. For example, for people from high-context cultures where information is conveyed using contextual signals such as body language, voice, and indirect description, it is essential to go beyond language and dialect translations. You may need to take additional steps to ensure the content and delivery of materials resonates and does not conflict with cultural norms or styles. Consider what platforms and/or spaces your communities go to and trust for information, and recruit messengers who are members of the communities you serve to help ensure that messages are authentic and relevant.
Don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. Get to know the community, and then you will know what is going to be most impactful for them.
AFAHO
Implementation
ideas
Conduct focus groups and message testing.
Selecting familiar, comfortable, and trusted locations (e.g., schools, places of worship, grocery stores, barber shops, senior centers, and public parks and pools) can help to alleviate community members’ anxieties about vaccination and other health services..
Speak to community-specific concerns.
When communities have pressing concerns related to safety or meeting basic needs, it can be difficult to prioritize preventive measures like vaccination. When possible, outreach and education materials should also acknowledge and take steps to address other urgent concerns.
Use visuals to convey cultural relevance.
Incorporating symbols and images of cultural significance, including photographs and drawings of people who are members of your community, is an important nonverbal cue to let people know that a resource is for them. This may be particularly important when generic language is used. When engaging members of the community for photos, be sure to share with them when, where, and how you will use the photos and provide the option to opt in or out.
Use visuals to convey cultural relevance.
The content and format of your messaging will likely vary depending on cultural context — including the heritage cultures of the communities you serve. Be prepared to tailor messaging to best convey your message to specific segments of communities.
Contextualize resources:
Provide complementary materials to help contextualize or focus resources that are not tailored to your community. Translate materials into relevant languages when necessary.
Tailor based on cultural context:
Consider whether the community members you are serving come from high-context or low-context heritage cultures. In high-context cultures, information and meaning are conveyed through context, signals, and symbols. In low-context cultures, information and meaning are stated directly.
Diversify outreach strategies:
While the convenience of virtual outreach best serves many populations, some communities still prefer face-to-face outreach and view this as a necessary step in building trust. Face-to-face outreach and hard-copy resources are essential for communities without access to the internet or devices for accessing virtual platforms.
Streamline access to materials:
If you are creating materials for staff at partner organizations to use during their community interactions, consider one-pagers, door hangers or flyers for face-to-face outreach as well as creating unbranded content they can adapt with their logos and visual symbols that are significant to their communities.
Keep in mind
Project HEALINGS used partnerships to create cross-cultural programming and translated graphics.
Project Partner Example
ITCM used culturally-relevant visual symbols that have important meaning to many Native American communities in all of their educational materials. For example, see the images throughout ITCM’s patient resource on vaccinations.
Reflection questions
What do you know about the kind of messages that resonate with the communities you serve? What don’t you know? Who can help you fill in the gaps?
Strategy 2:
Fulfill language needs and preferences
Fulfilling language needs is about more than translating materials or having an available interpreter at events. Consider how the communities you serve are most comfortable communicating, including body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and tone of voice. Verbal and nonverbal communication practices can vary among speakers of the same language based on factors such as regional dialect, age, gender identity, and heritage country. Working and partnering with staff who share cultural and linguistic backgrounds with the communities they serve can help ensure that you respect these nuanced language needs and preferences.
All of our canvassers are Spanish speakers … We always have everything in English and Spanish, and we translate at vaccine clinics. It’s not just about giving them the paper, but it’s about the communication.
DHF
Implementation ideas
Provide translation and interpretation for communities and staff.
This includes translating flyers and handouts that are distributed directly to community members, providing interpretation during webinars and live events when possible, and translating resources such as toolkits and guidebooks developed for community-facing staff within your own organization and partner organizations. This is often overlooked when staff are multilingual, but can help ensure that messages are translated accurately and nothing is lost in real-time translation.
Leverage and build staff capacity for translation.
As appropriate, multilingual staff can provide translation and interpretation services themselves, or provide guidance on whether translated materials from public health agencies and other external partners are culturally appropriate and inclusive of different dialects. Provide training to staff for advancing their skills as they wish and fairly compensate them for this work.
Partner to expand translation capacity.
If you are seeking to expand your reach to new populations and do not have capacity to hire staff from those communities, consider whether there are community-led organizations you could partner with to help translate information and resources. You can also ask funders to cover the cost of translation services.
Don’t expect staff members to provide translation:
Only ask multilingual staff and partners to support translation if it is a clear part of their job description and skill set or they receive training and additional compensation for their time. Expecting staff members to support translation when it is not part of their normal role can be exploitative, and could cause staff to feel tokenized and perpetuate harm.
Consider literacy levels:
Communication needs and preferences within your community may vary based on community members’ literacy levels — in both English and heritage languages — as well as the presence of oral and written cultural traditions.
Keep in mind
Project Partner Example
AFAHO and Project HEALINGS had resources and public service announcements (PSAs) translated into multiple languages to meet the needs of the many diverse communities they serve.
Project HEALINGS PSA video featuring Rodolfo Gutierrez from HACER.
Reflection questions
What languages and dialects do the communities you serve use, and does your organization have the capacity to translate and interpret resources into those languages and dialects?
Strategy 3:
Recognize diversity within communities
Most people hold multiple, intersecting identities that inform how they respond to specific messages, mediums, and messengers. Consider how factors such as gender identity, age, sexual orientation, religious identity, profession, education level, income level, heritage culture, number of years living in the U.S., and other lived experiences may shape how people receive your messages. While it may not be feasible to design tailored messages and messaging strategies for each unique subpopulation within the communities you serve, direct consultation with community members is the best way to identify whether there are large subpopulations you may be missing with current strategies and approaches.
We made sure we tailored our general messaging points based on research and feedback from community outreach surveys and listening sessions. This included having extensive context for trust concerns and potential barriers to access that allowed our practitioners to enter into one-on-one conversations with cultural knowledge that let them have a unique conversation with each patient based on that individuals’ unique concerns.
PHS
Implementation ideas
Craft messages that reflect the diversity of the communities you serve.
It’s important to convene focus groups and listening sessions to ensure that you include multiple options and tailored language guidance for addressing diverse community members as needed.
Recruit trusted messengers with multiple, intersectional identities.
Consider the many intersectional identities within the communities you serve when recruiting canvassers, outreach workers, and other community-facing staff. Make sure you are compensating staff members fairly for any consultation they provide.
Use stories to add depth to data.
Individual stories and quotes may resonate with community members in ways that data and statistics do not. Combining available quantitative data with individual stories and quotes from interviews helps tell a powerful story of how intersectional identities affect health status, health-related decision making, and outcomes.
Project Partner Example
Public Health Solutions developed tailored messaging guides for one-on-one conversations that centered on individuals’ unique concerns and needs. For example, they considered the various experiences and intersectional identities of pregnant people or people who may become pregnant when developing outreach materials. See Public Health Solution’s Delivering Trust website for community workers, which includes a toolkit on “How to Have Positive Conversations About Pregnancy and the Pandemic.”
Reflection questions
Who are the unique and intersectional subpopulations within the communities you work with, and how might they respond to messages differently?
How can you combine data with stories to paint a fuller picture of community members’ needs and experiences?
What nuances are important in communication styles in the communities that you work with?
