Targeting adolescents with public health messages often requires a fresh, youthful perspective that only a child can provide. For this "happy-go-lucky" target, healthcare messages are usually considered boring, uncool or scary.
But adolescents can be a key audience for healthcare safety campaigns that aim to change their behaviors as well as disease advocacy programs that attempt to increase awareness levels of sensitive illnesses and conditions.
Here, we look at two healthcare campaigns that solicited adolescent perspectives for an Alzheimer's youth educational campaign and an agency employee relations initiative.
Relating to Adolescents
Public health communicators at the American Health Assistance Foundation (AHAF), a Rockville, Md.-based charity, is educating the adolescent market about Alzheimer's disease with a book campaign titled Fading Memories: An Adolescent's Guide to Alzheimer's Disease, that reflects the personal experiences of this target. "Most of our [Alzheimer's] efforts were geared to caregivers and adult family members, but we know that kids are also affected by this debilitating disease and we couldn't find anything out there that addressed their concerns," said Erin Conners, AHAF's public education manager.
What started out as a focus group involving a group of 30 eighth-grade students at Blessed Sacrament School in Alexandria, Va., evolved into a semester-long book project that used the personal experiences of five children in the classroom and other submissions throughout the country including Nebraska, Alabama and New York. "They told us they wanted the facts [about Alzheimer's]," said Conners of the adolescent-driven campaign. The $25,000 effort allowed the adolescent target of 10- to 14-year-olds to write the first draft of the book, choose the cover design and title, and take their own photographs of relatives with Alzheimer's. Fading Memories ultimately used 17 submissions and achieved three key objectives for AHAF:
- To present clear, poignant examples of what Alzheimer's is and how it impacts an adolescent family member.
- To provide pointers for how adolescents should cope with telling friends about the disease.
- To encourage adolescents to talk to their parents about the disease.
AHAF printed 10,000 books and is distributing them to schools, social workers and gerontologists primarily through its funding source, the Washington, D.C.-based Independent Telephone Pioneers Association (ITPA), a volunteer membership organization of current and retired employees of the independent telephone industry, which has 200 chapters nationwide. Promoted by AHAF and ITPA through press releases and newsletter writeups, this effort has already generated an impressive response of 1,000 book requests and about 20 calls per day on AHAF's toll-free hotline, according to Conners.
Turning Employees Into Heroes
For Corbett HealthConnect, a Chicago-based healthcare advertising agency, a group of pre-teens will be targeted year-round for a company-wide initiative to help employees achieve a better balance between work and family commitments.
When HealthConnect's President Scott Cotherman was asked to do a career presentation to his 10-year-old daughter's class this past March, the timing could not have been better. The agency had just rolled out its "Project EQ" campaign earlier this year, its new employee relations effort that promotes strengthening employee-family bonds.
Instead of doing a run-of-the-mill classroom presentation, Cotherman thought that his daughter's 24 classmates would be better served by a pilot educational campaign that would give them a better appreciation of advertising. "The kids had great misperceptions about advertising; they thought ads were very manipulative and ways to get people to buy things they really didn't need," he said.
The pilot evolved into the "KidConnect" campaign and highlighted key objectives to help children related to employees:
- Gain a better understanding of the advertising industry;
- Expand their problem-solving skills; and
- Recognize health and safety issue that threaten their lives.
For eight weeks the group of 10-year-olds were transformed into an advertising agency: given a name, a client and a strategic partner (Corbett HealthConnect). Their assignment was to develop a print PSA campaign to help improve the health of America's youth.
The topics ranged from the long-term benefits of drinking milk and the benefits of eating nutritious food vs. junk food to using helmets with skateboards, bicycles and rollerblades.
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Targeting Kids With Kids
For youth-focused healthcare campaigns, using kids to deliver key messages is especially useful to:
Source: HPRMN |
The creative executions won the praise of HealthConnect employees and its clients when they were displayed in the agency's lobby.
The ads were such a hit that the agency will be expanding the effort (once it is fine-tuned) to its 115 employees and clients three to four times throughout next year. Although the program can turn employees into "heroes for the day," Cotherman pointed out that the bugs need to be worked out. (The pilot commanded 800 to 1,000 billing hours ($120/hour). "This is a great way to solidify employee relationships but we have to make sure it's managed efficiently and streamlined as a turn-key program that doesn't become too costly." (AHAF, 301/948-3244; ITPA, 202/326-7237; HealthConnect, 312/664-5310)