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Background: One-third of Louisiana adolescents are overweight and obese. BRFSS data for 2007 broken down by race indicates that in Louisiana, 39.7% of African-Americans were obese and 32% were overweight. A lack of physical activity is one of the main factors contributing to obesity. Twenty-five percent of high school students in Louisiana do not meet recommendations for physical activity. In 2007, 45% of New Orleans youth reported participating in at least 20 minutes of vigorous physical activity on three or more of the past seven days compared to 69% nationally.
Program background: Be Heard is a pilot health promotion project that seeks to address this problem by encouraging the development of user-generated content to reach African American youth in New Orleans, aged 13 to 18. Established through a partnership with the Tulane Prevention Research Center, Entergy’s Charitable Foundation and Q93 radio station, Be Heard was launched as a radio contest to create spoken-word messages or song lyrics focused on the importance of physical activity and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Be Heard’s strategy utilized the two-step flow theory of communications whereby communicating to and leveraging the creativity of gatekeepers allows teens to speak to their peers about being physically active in their own words. Top entries were recorded in the radio studio and “making-of” videos were produced and uploaded to the contest Web site and You Tube. Social media sites, like Facebook and MySpace, were used to generate campaign awareness and encourage voting. Grassroots marketing was also utilized to target hard-to-reach youth in community centers, barbershops and at schools. The public was invited to vote for their favorite spot, and the winning spot aired on Q93 radio station for one week.
Evaluation Methods and Results: A thorough process evaluation was conducted during this campaign. Real-time data was available for text-message votes, Web hits and online voting. A sampling of the available data is as follows. During the entry solicitation phase, the Q93 contest page had 269 page views and 207 unique visitors. Additionally, there were 110 clicks on Facebook during this phase. The contest page received 833 visitors during the voting phase and 410 unique visitors. Facebook received 110 clicks and MySpace received 129 clicks during this phase. More than 12,000 votes were received, 99% of which were text message votes.
Conclusions: Data resulting from this pilot study showed the effort was feasible and successful relative to implementation and participation.
Implications for research and/or practice: User-generated content campaigns can be an effective means for influencing "hard-to-reach" populations. Additionally, text-messaging is a desirable channel for communicating to younger people and the economically disadvantaged. Future efforts will involve a larger scale study which will include effectiveness testing.