The Research That Made a Movement: How Shape Your World Came to Be

Background:  The obesity epidemic can’t be solved with one strategy. There are many causes and many solutions. One strategy is to increase rates of physical activity by improving active transportation and recreational opportunities in the built environment. The built environment concept is fairly new to public health. This issue has long been held by agencies such as Commerce, Transportation and DENR. Their policies and planning have led communities to be less conducive to people leading active daily lives. To add to that, North Carolina leaves most land use decisions to local communities who face barriers created by state level policies.

Program background:  North Carolina DHHS received American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to affect state policy in support of active living. The challenge was to implement a comprehensive communications campaign that could positively impact such a goal. As mentioned in the background statement, a number of built environment decisions are made at the local level but meet the obstacle of state policies that are prohibitive. And, since State agencies aren’t allowed to directly advocate to legislators, we had to be creative in how we could use communications strategies to influence state policy. During the first year of funding, we focused our efforts on doing formative research to create a statewide campaign that would help people understand how health is impacted by the built environment and inspire them get involved with the issue on a local level creating the demand for changes at the state level. This effort became, Shape Your World.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  The project goal is to implement state level policies that promote healthy environments and active lifestyles in North Carolina communities. The goals of the communications research were:

1. Gauge public knowledge and attitudes about the built environment and related issues
2. Determine how the media reports on the built environment and health
3. Uncover critical insights to inspire messaging, marketing plan and creative development
4. Identify key consumer target audiences
5. Inform the development of public policy  

Research methods included a random digit dialed survey, media content analysis as well as the newer, more innovative method of virtual focus groups, to explore a variety of concepts and realities as they relate to people on a state, regional and local level. We explored trends in perceptions, behaviors, environments and civic involvement. The result is Shape Your World, a locally driven movement across North Carolina to make communities healthier by creating more opportunities for recreation and transportation that enable people to be active in their daily lives.

Conclusions:  When public health advocacy efforts have the funding and opportunity to adequately research and apply findings to campaigns, they are more effective in creating the desired changes. Through Shape Your World's research, we identified four distinct types of involved citizens as well as four key motivators in which to move them to action.

Implications for research and/or practice:  This research and campaign provides powerful insight into motivating would be advocates to take action to create healthier communities.