Messages to motivate community involvement in health campaigns: Lessons learned from Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW)

CDC's Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) aims to achieve broad reaching, highly impactful, and sustainable change to reduce chronic disease morbidity and mortality associated with obesity and tobacco use. The National Prevention Media Initiative for CPPW supports and maximizes community activities, as well as complements efforts of other childhood obesity-focused initiatives such as “Let's Move.”

Several concepts were tested to convey themes of supporting community actions for improved access to healthy foods, smoke-free environments, and places for physical activity. We identified as a priority audience parents who are concerned with their children's health environment, but feel overwhelmed and unable to initiate community-wide change. We will discuss challenges to broadening horizons of parents to think beyond individual behavior change. Findings from focus groups and online validation surveys suggested specific text and images to better motivate the audience toward the call to action. Additionally, we learned to narrow the priority audience of parents to focus on those who perceived more control to make changes in their child's environment.