Using Community Engagement to Develop a Biking Campaign Addressing Health Disparities

Background: Neighborhood-specific data reflect significant differences in health outcomes among Boston residents. Black and Latino residents experience worse health outcomes, chronic disease, and mortality than white residents overall. Similar racial/ethnic differences in income, education, and employment status also exist. (Health of Boston Report 2014-2015).

Program background:Levels of physical activity are significantly lower among Blacks, Latinos, and people with lower SES living in Boston. For its CDC-funded project, Boston Partnerships to Improve Community Health (PICH), the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) developed a campaign to reach lower-income, people of color, and recent immigrants and address beliefs and attitudes about bicycling as part of active transportation. BPHC worked with the Health Communication Core at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to develop the campaign, which was a collaboration among BPHC, Boston residents who partner as Boston PICH’s Healthy Community Champions, and the Boston Department of Transportation. Neighborhood residents participated in eight focus groups, and several themes emerged. Cost, safety, and lack of access to a bike were cited as common barriers to bicycling. Many participants also perceived that biking is for “other people”—i.e., people who are predominantly young, white, male, tourists, or “hipsters.” Motivations for biking included saving money and time, personal health, recreation, promoting green transportation, and the freedom and convenience of not driving or taking public transit. Community members wanted the campaign to show “people like me.” Seven local residents (including a Latino radio host and an African-American bike shop owner), were the campaign models. They were photographed with their bikes, and in handwriting shared their personal reasons for biking. Campaign materials highlighted local resources to help overcome barriers to biking, such as subsidized bike-sharing memberships, community biking events, and bike repair workshops at local farmer markets.

Evaluation Methods and Results:Campaign concepts were pretested with neighborhood residents, who provided positive feedback. They especially appreciated that the campaign presented biking as a choice, not something they were being told to do. The multi-lingual campaign included large media in English and Spanish and small materials in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese. Campaign materials directed viewers to the Boston Bikes website for resources in these languages. Billboards, bus interiors and exteriors, transit stations, and backlit displays at bike-sharing hubs across the city displayed the campaign in English and Spanish throughout the summer of 2016. The campaign had 272 different placements and approximately 11,294,725 impressions. Additional media, selected based on preferences identified by the focus groups, included backlit displays at bike-sharing hubs and promotional items for distribution at events, such as bike reflectors and stickers. Based on its success, BPHC relaunched the campaign in May 2017.

Conclusions: Identifying and responding to the perceptions, motivations, and barriers to biking among Boston residents at risk of health disparities was key to development of a mass media campaign they found relevant and useful.

Implications for research and/or practice: Incorporating peer role models and incorporating the concept of personal choice supports community engagement in campaigns promoting healthy behaviors.