141st APHA Annual Meeting

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

Monday, November 4, 2013 : 8:50 AM - 9:10 AM

Rachelle Reeder, MPH , The Monday Campaigns, The Monday Campaigns, New York, NY
Morgan Johnson, MPH , The Monday Campaigns, New York, NY
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.

Learning Areas:
Administer health education strategies, interventions and programs
Communication and informatics
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs

Learning Objectives:
Describe the development and success of the “Healthy Monday” campaign Describe the universities’ experiences bringing “Healthy Monday” to campus and how it contributed to successful programmatic outcomes. Discuss ways in which other program developers and researchers can leverage the “Monday Effect” to improve and expand their own health services.

Keywords: Communication, Health Promotion

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: As the Program and Research Associate at The Monday Campaigns, I have been involved with pilot recruitment, program implementation, and campaign evaluation for Healthy Monday campus initiatives, and can speak in detail about them. I have my MPH and a background in health communications and social marketing as well as research on various public health topics, such as HIV prevention and college student health.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.