Leveraging Natural Attention Cycles for Targeted Health Communication

Background: In recent years, the number of text and email-based health campaigns has skyrocketed, largely due to the cost-effectiveness and ease of use of such technologies.  While evaluating outcomes is of course critical for any public health initiative, practitioners could potentially increase program impact by answering the following process-related questions: 1) How often should we be sending communications to program participants? and 2) When is the ideal window of time to be delivering these messages?  These questions regarding “dosage” have yet to be adequately answered by the scientific community.  However, current evidence suggests that weekly messages may be an ideal frequency to motivate people to start and maintain healthy behaviors, and Monday may be the best day for such messages to be delivered. 

Program background: The Monday Campaigns is a non-profit public health initiative in association with Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Maxwell School at Syracuse. The goal of the program is to help end chronic preventable disease by leveraging weekly periodicities in health behavior to sustain media campaigns for health.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Several longitudinal data sets were evaluated for emerging patterns, including day-by-day data on internet searches for health beahvior topics, calls to tobacco quit lines, and gym attendance.  Trends across data sets indicated a weekly periodicity to health behavior, with a "surge" at the beginning of each week, followed by a significant decline towards the end of the week.

Conclusions: Health behaviors exhibit clear periodicities, most notable at the 7-day, or weekly interval, and these patterns are consistent across a variety of behaviors.

Implications for research and/or practice: Studying these cycles may help streamline health communication programs by more efficiently allocating media resources at certain optimal times, as well as highlighting when is the best time to promote these programs to capture the attention of the most people.