Information rarely changes behaviour on its own
Culture, access, stress and stigma do most of the work, which is why campaigns built as awareness fail and campaigns built as behaviour change, segmented by audience and evaluated against a baseline, do not. Health communication is the discipline of finding what a specific audience already believes, what is actually stopping them, and what message in what channel moves it. Health communication that changes behaviour is the long version of that argument.
- Behaviour-change campaign design. Audience-segmented campaigns for outcomes where elimination is unrealistic and stigma backfires, built on the harm-reduction and health-promotion evidence base.
- Audience research and message testing. Who the audience actually is, what they believe, and which message survives contact with them, before a single asset is produced.
- Health literacy and plain language. Clarity is an intervention, not polish: the difference between a message that is read and one that is acted on.
- Programme communication at population scale. Reaching ten million beneficiaries of a government-to-person stipend across a multi-bank platform, where the communication problem was access and trust, not awareness.
- Evaluation. Baselines, reach and behaviour measures, so the programme can prove it worked. My MPH capstone documented roughly three times reach amplification on a multi-platform campaign.
- Health-system communication in a crisis. During COVID, the Praava Health programmes I directed reached roughly two percent of Bangladesh's population, about 3.6 million people.
Proof, not promises
Three engagements that show the pattern. Each one opens the full case study.
Commercial rigour in public-health work
Most health communication is judged on outputs: materials produced, sessions held, reach claimed. I came to public health from seventeen years of growth marketing, where the only question is whether the number moved, and I bring that discipline to programmes that are used to reporting activity. It is also why I founded HSREP, a platform on health-system resilience and household financial protection: the communication problem and the financing problem are usually the same problem seen from two sides.
Who this is for, and who it is not
It is for health systems and hospital groups, NGOs and development programmes, ministries and public agencies, health-tech companies that need patient communication done properly, and universities running health-promotion programmes, in Bangladesh and in the United States. It is not for clinical content authoring; I work with your clinicians on what the message should be, and on making sure it lands.
Start with a thirty-minute call
Bring the number you are trying to move. I will tell you what I would look at first, and whether I am the right person to look at it.
Questions people ask before we talk
What is the difference between health communication and health marketing?
Marketing sells a product; health communication changes a behaviour, often one the audience has good reasons not to change. The tools overlap; the ethics, the evidence base and the measures do not.
Do you work with NGOs and government programmes?
Yes. The largest programme on my record was a government-to-person stipend rollout reaching ten million beneficiaries, and I work with development organisations that need a commercial operator rather than another report.
What does CHES mean for the work?
Certified Health Education Specialist: a credential in the planning, implementation and evaluation of health-education programmes. In practice it means the campaign is built on the evidence base and measured properly.
Do you work in both Bangladesh and the United States?
Yes. Most of the population-scale work is from Bangladesh; the campus harm-reduction campaign and my public-health training are from Michigan. I am based in Michigan and work remotely with Bangladesh.
What does the first month look like?
Audience research, a baseline, and a written message architecture: who we are talking to, what they believe now, what has to change, and how we will know it did.
Md Shafaat Ali Choyon (also written Shafaat Choyon) is a health communication and growth strategist based in Redford, Michigan. MBA, MCIM, MPH and CHES®. Founder of HSREP, a health-system resilience platform. The same body of work, presented for other needs: growth marketing, Michigan, growth marketing, Bangladesh, fractional CMO, Michigan, brand and communications, digital health, population health, fractional COO and CMO, health. Bangladesh readers: বাংলায় পড়ুন.