Radio Dramas: Seven C's of Effective Communication

1. Command attention.
Drama, with its fascinating characters and exciting plots, can attract and hold the listeners’ attention throughout many episodes. Drama also can direct attention to a social message by making it stand out from all the other information a listener receives in the course of a day, by demonstrating how the message is relevant and useful to listeners, by showing that it is compatible with listeners’ beliefs, and by making it attractive.

2. Cater to the heart and the head.
Emotional involvement is every bit as important as information when it comes to attracting an audience and motivating listeners to change. An emotional response will increase the time and energy a listener spends thinking about the message. Furthermore, decisions that are reached logically are strengthened if the decision is also emotionally rewarding. Drama has the ability to involve listeners in a range of emotional experiences as well as to provide them with information to help them to improve their lives.

3. Clarify the message.
Messages must be clearly understood in order to be effective. Drama allows the message to be presented by various characters in language and in situations that the audience can understand and readily recall. By demonstrating the message, role-model characters make the message much clearer than any abstract description.

4. Communicate a benefit.
Listeners will be more likely to risk trying a new behaviour if they believe it has real advantages. Through role modeling by the various characters, drama can demonstrate to listeners the benefits to be gained from a change in their life styles. It can quickly illustrate the consequences, both good and bad, of various behaviours.

5. Create trust.
As listeners become personally and emotionally involved with role-model characters in the drama, they come to see the characters as real people whom they can trust and rely upon. If the drama features experienced, knowledgeable characters who can relate to listeners’ lives, then listeners will trust the message that they are delivering.

6. Call to action.
People need encouragement to discuss new ideas, to make difficult decisions, and to attempt a new behavior. Characters in dramas have the power to inspire and motivate listeners to try a new behaviour and to advocate it to their families and friends.

7. Be consistent.
Because a detailed Writer’s Brief guides the creation of serial drama for development, the drama always delivers the message to the listening audience in a consistent, appropriate, and relevant manner no matter how many characters restate the message in how many different ways. Consistent repetition of the message helps listeners to understand new ideas, to learn how to perform a new behaviour, and to rehearse mentally how they might act.