“healthy monday”: Driving universities to ask, “what the health?”

Public health practitioners often struggle with how to effectively deliver health communications to college populations. One approach is to disseminate health communications when college audiences are most receptive to these messages. New research shows that sending weekly messages on Mondays may be an ideal frequency and time to motivate people to start and maintain healthy behaviors. By leveraging the natural tendency to focus on health behaviors at the beginning of the week, campus health promotion programs can boost participation levels and contribute to establishing habitual thinking about health. Building on this idea, The Monday Campaigns created “Healthy Monday,” a creative campaign that encourages students, faculty, and university staff to use Monday as the day they think about their health choices and make efforts to engage in healthy behaviors. Several universities across the country are participating in “Healthy Monday” and using the campaign as a platform to increase participation in their comprehensive health initiatives that cover a range of health behaviors such as exercise, healthy eating, sexual health, tobacco cessation, and more. This session describes the success stories of Health Monday initiatives at several universities, including Murray State University, Johns Hopkins University, Northern Kentucky University, and Syracuse University. It details how these universities leveraged diverse partnerships, ran successful health campaigns, and improved their programmatic outcomes using Healthy Monday. Furthermore, this session demonstrates how other organizations can replicate these successes with their own populations by leveraging the “Monday Effect” to successfully disseminate health communications and improve programmatic outcomes.