Healthy Works: Marketing Community Change, Leadership In Pursuit of Wellness

Background: Healthy Worksis the San Diego County branding of Communities Putting Prevention to Work, a nationwide, CDC-funded initiative addressing policy, systems and environment change related to obesity prevention.

Program background: Under the Healthy Works brand, 15 divergent interventions encouraging community involvement and leadership were implemented, with the sought-after outcome of better community wellness. This presentation will share how San Diego County successfully faced the challenge of creating awareness around numerous programs with varied audiences and target demographics.  Audiences included:

• Community leaders who could rally neighborhoods around projects involving nutrition and physical activity. These leaders included parents, teachers, business owners and influential policymakers, along with concerned neighborhood residents. The marketing informed these leaders and future leaders that they could thrive as vital policy changers, shifting long-established policy patterns and outdated rules and regulations toward easier access to healthy choices.
• Underserved populations exposed to harsh health disparities.

 These underserved populations included:

• Low-income and traditionally neglected neighborhoods
• Communities with varied ethnicities and speaking different languages.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Methods, results and lessons learned will be shared surrounding a marketing campaign consisting of television, radio and transit advertising, along with earned media, social media, web site and direct-mail outreach, reaching the mass majority of the County’s 3.2 million residents.

Conclusions: By using multiple marketing techniques under a common-message umbrella of community and personal wellness, we were able to reach different economic and social classes, inspiring all to become involved participants. The Healthy Works campaign established clarity in policy, systems and environment marketing, helping San Diego County residents improve wellness in the places where they live, work, learn and play.

Implications for research and/or practice: This presentation will demonstrate successful practices around disseminating information to varied sectors of the county population.The presentation will further demonstrate how we were able to fully implement the emerging trend of marketing that establishes the environment as a primary concern in the many paths toward healthier living. The presentation will describe how the success of the campaign prompted the County’s Health and Human Services Agency to adopt Healthy Works as its ongoing and official branding umbrella over numerous community-health outreach projects.