Monday campaigns – raising health online through grassroots movements

Public health practitioners often struggle with how to effectively deliver health communications to online audiences, particularly through social media channels. The ideal approach is to disseminate health communications when audiences are most receptive to these messages. New research shows that engaging audiences weekly on Mondays may be an ideal window of 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, health promotion initiatives that use email, text, or social media messaging can boost participant engagement and contribute to establishing habitual thinking about health. Building on this idea, The Monday Campaigns created a fleet of creative campaigns centered on the message for audiences to use Monday as the day they reflect on their health choices and make efforts to engage in healthy behaviors. Several diverse organizations across the country are participating in “Monday” campaigns, using them as platforms to increase participation in their comprehensive health initiatives that cover a range of health behaviors such as exercise, proper nutrition, sexual health, tobacco cessation, caregiver health, and more. Most notably, “Meatless Monday” has flourished online, with tens of thousands of followers on social media coming together each week to swap recipes and share their support. This session describes the grassroots success of “Monday” initiatives online, and furthermore, 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.