Digital Community

ABOUT OUR DIGITAL COMMUNITY

The ultimate goal of SACCounty Healthy Beginning’s prevention campaign is to enhance the public’s, professionals’ and policy makers’ readiness to learn, to accept information, and to change behavior, policy and practice to support alcohol- and drug-free pregnancies.   The overriding principle that drives our work is that good science makes for good policy and successful prevention.  How we communicate scientific information is key, so we rely upon four key elements that research has shown to be the basic requirements for translating science into messaging:

• Social validity:  Information is presented in a way that it fits with the learner’s life and values.

• Information is "in the moment":  Information is easily accessible in the moment it is most important. 

• Ecological validity:  Information is delivered within an environment that is appropriate and non-threatening.

• Stakeholder participation:  Place learners in control of retrieving the information, making them active learners.

A digital community fulfills these four elements.  Information can be presented in creative and engaging ways.  Users can seek out the information the moment they need it, in the safe environment of their own home, and the user is in control of the pace, the depth, and the breadth of the information they retrieve. 

SACCounty Healthy Beginning’s digital community, distributed across multiple platforms will make reliable, science-based information available to all community members. This campaign will bring trusted resources into all homes and will, above all, attempt to remove the stigma around general substance abuse difficulties and, more specifically, substance use and misuse during pregnancy.