The Social Marketing National Excellence Collaborative is a bright, talented, supportive, fun loving, politically astute network of public health professionals from all sectors, who seek to increase the understanding and use of social marketing in public health at all levels. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded the SMNEC as part of its Turning Point Initiative. Though the original funding for the collaborative is no longer available, the group continues to seek new funds in order to promote the use of social marketing in public health, and in related safety and environmental areas. The Watson Group supports the collaborative's web site, in order to offer its tools and to provide an opportunity to engage its members and its constituencies.
The collaborative offers a number of helpful social marketing resources. Its signature resource is CDCynergy-Social Marketing Edition, a CD ROM based social marketing 
planning tool, developed jointly with the Academy for Educational Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To encourage use of CDCynergy-Soc, the collaborative offers user training, so individuals and organizations can make best use of the over 700 resources on the CD. SMNEC also offers publications on social marketing basics and social marketing for managers, both geared to the steps in the CDCynergy-Soc planning model, as well as a collection of best practice social marketing case studies. Finally, the collaborative offers access to an on-line video presentation on "Social Marketing on a Shoestring Budget." (Rebecca Brookes, a master social marketer, conducted this workshop for a continuing education series offered by the State University of New York-Albany School of Public Health.) To view and order these and other resources, visit the collaborative's web site.
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