Social Marketing - Solar Energy
Learn here about the work of the Jordan Social Marketing Center - an organisation that has close links with the NSMC.

Who are we?

The Jordan Social Marketing Center (JSMC) is a not-for-profit company set up in 2014 to develop knowledge, skills and capacity in social marketing and achieve behaviour change for development in Jordan and the Middle East. The JSMC maintains close links with the UK's National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC).

The staff at the JSMC are all trained practitioners with wide experience of planning, delivering and evaluating behaviour change through the social marketing planning process in Jordan. They have all been involved in some of the largest and most far-reaching programmes in the country aimed at achieving national behaviour change in the environmental sector.

What is social marketing and why is it important for Jordan?

Social marketing is an approach which has been widely used across the world to develop activities that change or maintain people’s behaviour for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole. Combining ideas from commercial marketing and the social sciences, social marketing is a proven tool for influencing behaviour in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Social marketing helps improve the quality of individual citizen's lives, as well as providing answers to some of the key challenges facing Jordan in the environmental, health, education and civil rights sectors.

For more information on social marketing, please go the the NSMC's What is social marketing? page.

What do we offer?

The JSMC provides tailored behaviour change programmes using social science combined with marketing expertise. The demand for these programmes is increasing because traditional marketing techniques do not always take into account the human element, and do not utilise social science when designing interventions that aim to positively affect people’s well-being.   

The services we provide include research and evaluation, programme development and implementation, as well as training and mentoring.

Who can use our services?

We aim to help Jordanian organisations as they design and implement development programmes that have outreach marketing and communications components.  Social marketing techniques can be used in the health, education, environment, civil rights, youth engagement and transport sectors.

Recent projects

Water Management Initiative Project (Jordan) USAID

This project aims to support the Government of Jordan to achieve measurable improvement and sustainability in the water sector. The focus is on achieving behaviour change amongst water utility customers through the adoption of conservation and demand management practices.  The JSMC also provides strategic communication advice to water utilities to strengthen their water sector governance. 

In the first year of this five-year programme, the JSMC worked with the government to develop a strategy to reduce the number of  unpaid water bills in Amman and the Northern Governorates; as a result, levels of successful debt collection increased by 13% compared to the previous year.  In the coming years, the project will focus on household demand management projects using behaviour change techniques. 

The Royal Rangers – Social Marketing Training

The JSMC provided social marketing training to the Royal Rangers who are responsible for policing the National Parks and other major infrastructure resources in Jordan. The Royal Parks faced the challenge that many visitors to the  parks were breaking regulations in areas such as littering. As an alternative to simply issuing fines, the JSMC worked with the Royal Parks to develop a more productive and sustainable approach to change the behavious of park visitors.

Social marketing was also used to develop and implement a successful campaign to reduce litter on public beaches in Aqaba.

Managing Director: Ms. Maha Al Dergham, MBA University of Wales, UK

Maha has sixteen years experience in capacity building and institutional development and is a co-founder of the Jordan Social Marketing Center.  She has extensive experience of working in the water, energy, environment and vocational education sectors in Jordan.  Maha currently leads the behaviour change component of a major USAID water management initiative in Jordan. 

Maha also has considerable experience of carrying out specialised social marketing capacity training programmes to enable organisations in the development sector to deliver their own successful behaviour change programmes.

   

    

Director: Ms. Dania Al Husseini, MA Sustainable Development University of London, UK

Dania Husseini has worked for a wide range of international and national non-governmental not-for-profit organizations over the last fourteen years in Jordan, Palestine (including Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza) as well as Yemen.  Dania has extensive experience of planning, implementing and evaluating programmes in education, health, gender equity & women empowerment, enterprise development, poverty alleviation, workforce development and environmental mitigation.  

In addition, Dania has nine years of experience in fundraising and project management and was previously the Head of Fundraising Department at the King Hussein Foundation. Dania now specialises in monitoring and evaluation and is currently the Monitoring Evaluation and Learning Manager on a USAID-funded project aimed at promoting water technology and innovation.

To contact the Jordan Social Marketing Center, please email Ms. Maha Al Dergham at m_durgham@yahoo.com.