Get ready for UHC Day 2024! Step 2: Craft your message

For this year’s UHC Day updates, we’re sharing steps and tips to help you prepare your campaign. This is the second issue in the series. The first issue, titled Step 1: Know your audience, focused on how to identify your target audience. Did you miss it? Read it here.

Step 2: Craft your message

Once you have identified your target audience, the next question is: how will you get their attention? One of the most effective ways of captivating an audience is by showing them why your cause is the right thing to do, or why it is in their best interest.

For example, to emphasise that investing in universal health coverage (UHC) is a strong moral choice, you could highlight how it contributes to equity and human rights. To show how protecting people from impoverishing health costs is in your audience’s best interest, you might focus on how it benefits national economies by decreasing the need for long-term welfare support, increasing workforce participation, and building community resilience.    

Whichever angle you take, that will be your overarching or primary message; consider it the common thread throughout your campaign. You can then decide on secondary messages to support this common thread.

While primary messages seek to grab your audience’s attention (for example, “healthcare should never push people into poverty”), secondary messages support your argument or further tailor it to your target audience through more specific or concrete examples.

A useful tool for framing your messaging is the message triangle. This is where you introduce the problem, offer a solution, then provide a call to action that your audience can rally around.

This narrative framing can be adapted to different audiences. For example, imagine your campaign aims to urge decision makers to adopt laws to protect people from impoverishing health costs. Here’s what the message triangle could look like:

• Problem: The cost of health services is the main reason people do not access the essential care and treatment they need. What’s more, 344 million people (50% of the world’s poorest) who are already struggling to meet their basic needs (such as food and housing) have been pushed or pushed further into poverty when paying for health services or products out of their own pockets.

• Solution: When governments reduce or eliminate out-of-pocket payments for health services and products and remove financial barriers to essential health services, the gains are numerous. Education improves, as healthy children learn better. Gender equality increases, as women and girls can better access the health services they need (including for their reproductive health and rights). Worker absenteeism declines, as people’s physical and mental health improves. And health-related poverty decreases.

• Call to action: Governments must provide a regular national budget for financial health protection that guarantees access to a package of affordable essential health services that everyone can access throughout their lives, without financial hardship.  

It is useful to consider whether positive or negative framing is most appropriate in your advocacy. While a positive approach can energise, empower and inspire your audience, negative framing can also be useful to convey the urgent need for action. However, it is important to use these types of messages sparingly to avoid an alarmist tone. 

Finally, joining forces can be an excellent strategy to amplify your advocacy. Finding other advocates who align with your values and messaging can help you build broader support from policymakers, influencers and other audiences. It can also allow you to expand your influence into other areas of health or even non-health-related fields which complement your cause.  

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Customizable graphic

In addition to an advocacy letter template with suggested messaging to help you mobilize your government, the UHC Day toolkit includes a set of official graphics in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. But you can also make your own!

Download the customizable graphic template – which includes the campaign font, icons and silhouette – to adapt the visuals and text to match your primary and secondary messages and include your organization’s logo.

And don’t forget to use the #UHCDay hashtag on your social media networks to amplify your messages and engage with other UHC and SDG advocates!