Systematic Reviews of Health Promotion Campaigns

This project demonstrates how public health professionals can employ systematic reviews to discover and understand previously implemented health promotion campaigns. This project aims to support public health professionals who ask: What have others done when designing campaigns with goals similar to ours, and how well did these campaigns work? This project also aims to stimulate creative and interdisciplinary approaches to campaign design, showing designers how to quickly harvest from a variety of disciplines--and from the public health literature across a variety of topics--insights regarding innovative approaches to campaign design.

Systematic reviews typically focus on a single issue, such as skin cancer prevention. However, campaign designers find it helpful to look across issues to discover media, messages, and interventions that have proved effective in campaigns aimed at populations similar to the populations to be served by the campaign being developed. For example, a campaign that aims to improve nutrition habits in an urban population may discover useful strategies in a publication that details the ways in which an urban population was successfully persuaded to, say, minimize their risk of acquiring mosquito-borne diseases. This project details the steps involved in conducted a systematic review using an "across campaigns" approach, using as examples systematic reviews completed via this process, reviews that include abstracts from past years' APHA annual meetings.