iDECIDE: Using New Media and Innovative Technologies to Improve Preconception Care Awareness

• Background:

Crozer-Keystone Health System’s Women and Children’s Health Services in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Health, was awarded a two-year federal grant to create a social marketing demonstration project.  The ultimate goals of this project are to promote and educate on preconception care and contribute long term to lowering the infant morbidity rate in Delaware County. This social marketing demonstration project has been named the New Moms/New Parents Project.

• Program background:

The New Moms/New Parents Project created a health education campaign geared towards our target audience of 13-25 year old young women called iDECIDE.  The iDECIDE Campaign focused on seven main health topics including: having a medical home, sexual health, safe relationships, nutrition, exercise, mental health/stress, and folic acid.

• Evaluation Methods and Results:

 In order to create the campaign and to validate it, we conducted focus groups and street intercepts with our target audience to learn about their opinions and attitudes towards our topics.  The evaluation by Public Health Management Corporation found that girls aged 13-25 felt that they were often too busy to eat healthy and that most women their age ate poorly out of convenience. They also expressed that they felt that all of our themes were important, but because life is often busy and hectic, it is hard to stay physically, mentally, and sexually healthy.  Last, they felt that pregnancy and sexual health need to be discussed more with teens. Our evaluation team also conducted a focus group with health care providers to gauge concerns about their teen patients, as well as to learn what areas care providers felt that girls 13-25 lacked in knowledge. 

• Conclusions:

By using new media technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and a website, we could reach our audience more effectively.  In addition, by speaking with our audience instead of preaching at them, we found the most effective way of gauging their attention.  By combining the various backgrounds of our team, we felt that we created a cutting-edge program for our target audience that is both interesting and engaging to them. 

• Implications for research and/or practice:

The presentation will focus on the value of understanding your target audience and utilizing all available resources to better your project.  By combing the background skills of team members, we will teach how to remain ever changing and “fresh” to an audience whose trends change weekly.  The presentation will also focus on social media outlets and which one is right to reach your audience.  By using a multitude of unconventional and traditional approaches, you can have a successful social marketing campaign. We will discuss the iDECIDE campaign in detail and talk about sucesses and barriers in a large health system setting. Furthermore, we will discuss how a non-profit on a tight budget can compete with other campaigns vying for teen’s attention. ***Due to the nature of the funding, some of our team members may not be available at the time of the conference.  Possible presenter(s) for this abstract are: Joanne D. Craig, MS Administrative Director Michelle R. Scott, BS Project Coordinator Zannia Matthews, BS Community Development Coordinator We will have an answer if the abstract is approved.