Making Monday "The Day All Health Breaks Loose" for Tobacco Cessation

Background: Public health practitioners often struggle with how to effectively deliver health communications to audiences and encourage them to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. The ideal approach is to design a message that not only informs audiences of a healthy behavior, but provides a sustainable strategy to help them maintain the behavior. Furthermore, the ideal approach disseminates health communications when audiences are most receptive to these messages.  New research shows that engaging audiences weekly on Mondays may be an ideal window of time to motivate them to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. By leveraging the natural tendency to focus on health at the beginning of the week, social marketers can boost message receptivity and help audiences establish habitual thinking about health. Building on this idea, The Monday Campaigns created a fleet of social marketing campaigns encouraging audiences to use Monday as the day they reflect on their health choices and engage in healthy behaviors.

Program background: Several diverse organizations across the country are participating in “Monday” campaigns, using them as platforms to increase participation in health initiatives that cover a range of health behaviors such as exercise, proper nutrition, sexual health, and more. Most notably, “Meatless Monday” has flourished at a grassroots level, with tens of thousands of followers on social media coming together each week to share their support.  The Monday Campaigns has also used technologies to bring smoking cessation group counseling to a rural New York county by using video conferencing and text/email messaging to reach smokers who would otherwise be unable to participate due to distance or irregular work hours. Here, the Quit & Stay Quit Monday campaign evolved into a full program, bringing resources to a rural population.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Each Monday-based social marketing campaign was evaluated via a number of qualitative and quantitative methods, inlcuding pariticpant surveys, analysis of service provider data, web-based metrics such as social media engagement and site traffic and measures of reach for campaigns that also utilized traditional media (e.g. billboards, newspaper articles, etc).  Resutls demonstrate the campaigns were effective in increasing knowledge around targeted health topics and boosting program engagement and service uptake.

Conclusions: The Monday Campaigns are model health promotion campaigs grounded in widely accepted public health theory and practice methods that have significantly boosted desired health behaviors in populations served by participating campaign outlets such as local health departments, private health clinics, campus and employee wellness programs, etc.  

Implications for research and/or practice: This session describes the success of “Monday” campaigns and furthermore, demonstrates how other organizations can replicate this success by leveraging the “Monday Effect” to market sustainable health behaviors and improve programmatic outcomes.