Communicating for Impact: Strategies for Grantmakers

Since 1996, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation have collaborated on Sound partners for Community Health. Robert Wood Johnson's communications department funded the initiative, while Benton managed it. Benton brought considerable expertise in media and communications to the project and "wanted to learn about the use of community media." For ten years, Sound Partners projects in cities around the country enabled community organizations to collaborate with public broadcasters to raise awareness of health issues. "In the early days, it was little more than public service announcements, with aggressive outreach," explains Benton's program liaison Karen Menichelli. "Over time, it became much more tune-in kinds of programming — talk shows, telenovelas [Spanish-language soap operas], and so on."