By Iryna Lesyshyn, Strategist
Think about the last time you got a decent budget for a communication campaign. If that memory came to you straight away, you're one of the lucky ones. For most teams, stretched thin and working against institutional priorities that shift underneath them, the pull towards a quick win is real: strong social media analytics, a good number of clicks on a reel or a LinkedIn post, a figure worth writing into the final report. There's nothing inherently wrong with metrics. The question worth asking at the end of a campaign is different: what was the impact, and did we achieve what we set out to do?
That question only makes sense once you're clear about the kind of change you're actually chasing. Crisis comms and viral social moments run on their own rules and their own timelines, and this isn't about either of those. It's about long-term, sustained behavioural change: policy adoption, or a genuine shift in attitudes and beliefs, the sort of change that's built over months and years rather than a single news cycle.
Impact builds across a sequence, not a single campaign
Why are we talking about longevity at all? It comes down to how behavioural change actually works, and our method at BFBS Creative starts with conditioning the audience, giving people room to adapt to a topic and take in new information before asking anything more of them.
That's the groundwork the five phases build on:
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Awareness: people simply know the topic or campaign exists.
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Knowledge: they understand the basic facts behind it.
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Interest: they start to see it as relevant to them and want to know more.
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Support: they form a genuinely positive attitude towards it.
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Action: they act on it, which is the behaviour the whole campaign was built towards.
Each phase is dependent on the one before it, and skipping ahead rarely works. Without awareness, your audience cannot gain knowledge. Without piquing people's interest and earning their support, they're unlikely to take any action.
Even on a limited budget, it helps to map your audience's journey and focus properly on one phase at a time rather than trying to cover all of it at once. Your first campaign is very unlikely to be the one that delivers it, and that's absolutely normal. You plant the seed, but it takes time to see the actual impact of your work.
Consistency is what matters most here. Awareness on its own isn't enough if it isn't reinforced by the next layer, and that's exactly what repetition does: it's how a first impression gets carried forward into something that actually sticks, rather than fading before the next phase has a chance to build on it. Some behaviours take up to four times as long as others to embed, which is exactly why a strategy built around a single deadline tends to disappoint even when the underlying work is sound.
COVID vaccine uptake work in London shows the same pattern: evaluators found that sustained partnerships, built on a shared purpose and kept up outside of emergencies, did more for engagement than any single message pushed hard during a crisis.
It's also worth remembering that each additional phase asks more of the audience than the last, and that runs against how our brains are wired. We default to whatever takes the least effort, the path of least resistance. That's exactly why phase order matters so much in behavioural change: spend too long on a step, and you risk losing your audience's attention instead.
Don't expect behaviour to change, enable it
As for what actually motivates an audience to keep moving, that's where the COM-B model earns its place. It's a framework we use in our work, along with plenty of organisations across the UK government and beyond. In short, it holds that behaviour only changes once three things line up: capability, opportunity and motivation.
The MOD's Challenge Me initiative is a good illustration of it in practice. Suspicious behaviour on MOD sites, someone tailgating through a security entrance, a phone out where it shouldn't be, often gets noticed and then ignored, because challenging another person, regardless of their rank or yours, feels awkward. To tackle that, trained teams are sent into MOD sites to act out low-level suspicious behaviour, so personnel get real practice spotting and challenging it. The programme works because it operates on all three layers of the COM-B model: it builds personnel's capability to learn and report in a safe, trained environment, gives them the opportunity to act on it, and motivates them with recognition for a correct challenge. COM-B is effective when it prioritises longevity, since it takes time to align all three components the audience needs before their behaviour actually changes.
Our key takeaways for comms teams
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Embrace the mindset of long-term impact. One of the clearest patterns we've seen: the organisations and institutions that come out ahead are the ones that value investment in longevity and stability. Whatever the topic or sector, these teams work steadily and know how to plan on a long horizon, treating today's communications as a tactical step towards a bigger, longer-running strategy.
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Take it one step at a time. Awareness before interest, interest before support. Real people are engaging with your content, and they arrive with different levels of readiness for what you're asking of them.
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Maintain and sustain. Getting to awareness, or even interest, isn't the finish line. Keep the relationship with your audience going, understand how they see things, and keep showing up. Credibility and trust build over time, the same way they do between two people who've only just met.
So next time you catch yourself worrying about a tight budget, don't worry.
Even a small step counts, as long as it moves you closer to your communications goal.
Patience in communications is rewarding, even when the impact isn't tangible yet.