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Background: Radon is an invisible, odorless, colorless radioactive gas which is naturally occurring in soil. When it seeps into homes and other buildings it can build up to higher concentrations where it becomes a health threat. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking. The only way to know if a home, school, or workplace has elevated radon levels is to perform a radon test.[1]
Public health professionals often have the responsibility to educate communities they serve about radon and help them understand the importance of testing for radon in the home. Having access to quality communication materials can make it easier to inform target audiences. Additionally, customizable materials allow health departments to insert location-specific details without having to recreate content from scratch.
Program background: CDC’s Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects (DEHHE) designed its Radon Communication Toolkit to help public health practitioners increase awareness and understanding of radon, its health effects, and the importance of testing for radon. The toolkit contains five pieces including a fact sheet, infographic, matte article, press release, and social media posts. Our grantees and partners indicate that they prefer to use CDC-approved content for their products and messages. They also describe varying levels of capacity for graphic design. Based on their feedback, CDC chose to provide both ready-to-use materials and customizable versions of the same materials. Users access the toolkit components online and have the option to use static products or to use an interactive widget mechanism to personalize the individual pieces. Areas of customization include space to insert contact information and notices about upcoming events. After customizing the pieces, users can print and save PDF files.
Evaluation Methods and Results: Formative evaluation using key informant interviews with several state health department communicators informed the final design format and content selections, as well as the areas for customization. The toolkit will be available for public access in August 2016 and we hope to have preliminary process evaluation measures to report by the conference. Evaluation plans include monitoring traffic to the website, referral links from partner websites, and social media activity (quantity and quality).
Conclusions: Communicators participating in the formative evaluation reported that a radon communication toolkit would make their jobs easier and that they would likely use at least one of the pieces in their efforts. Proposed evaluation measures will demonstrate the use and describe the utility of the toolkit.
Implications for research and/or practice: Once the technology surrounding the interactive widget mechanism is finalized, DEHHE plans to adapt it to accommodate customization of additional communication and education pieces produced by the Division. Increasing availability of customizable materials decreases the burden on state and local health departments to produce quality products on their own.
[1] CDC. Radon in the Home. Accessible: http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/brochure/profile_radon.htm