300709
Listening to Your Audience: Effectively Reaching Rural Adult Low-SES Smokers with Personalized Counseling, Mobile-Optimized Website, and Updated Branding
Research informed how the personal is most powerful. Specifically we discovered that the real stories page on our Vermont Quit Network (VQN) website was of highest interest and engagement; the statewide network of quit counselors was more appealing for cessation than talking with a disembodied voice on the phone; and the VQN brand sounded impersonal and cold. We also learned that most low-SES population accessed the internet through their mobile phones and not computers.
This research resulted in renaming and branding the statewide network of quit counselors to Vermont Quit Partners; revamping and rebranding our website to 802Quits and optimizing for mobile phone; focusing on personal stories; and creating a testimonial campaign for TV and radio (4 TV; 2 radio) supported by social media and online web vignettes.
As a result, calls to the Quitline in 2013 have a greater than 100% increase from the 2004 - 2012 call volume. In its first month of launch (January 2014), visits to the new 802Quits website were 158% over January 2013, with over 5,000 more mobile visits than the previous year. This presentation will demonstrate how fndings from state-supported formative research were used to implement strategies that contributed to these increases.
Learning Areas:
Communication and informaticsDiversity and culture
Planning of health education strategies, interventions, and programs
Learning Objectives:
Describe how research findings from rural adult low-SES smokers were implemented into effective cessation initiatives, doubling calls to the state's Quitline.
Keyword(s): Rural Health, Tobacco Control
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: As Chronic Disease Information Director at the VT Department of Healthm, I have been the principal on tobacco prevention and cessation health promotion. I have more than 30 years experience in social marketing for public health and am currently on the editorial board for the Social Marketing Quarterly. My areas of interest have included tobacco control for many years.
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.