In a World Where Sex Sells – Using Monday to Sell Sexual Health

Background

When communicating about HIV and STI prevention, young men and women can be difficult to reach. Young people often take more risks and engage in fewer prevention behaviors than older adults. Many sexual risk reduction campaigns focus on fear-based approaches that are often ignored by younger audiences, especially when they do not provide a sustainable strategy for engaging in sexual risk reduction.

Methods

One way to communicate to young people about prevention and early detection is to think like marketers, who meticulously study consumer behaviors to know exactly when they are open to buy a product. Public health practitioners can leverage this same strategy and disseminate sexual health communications when people are most receptive to health messages - on Mondays. Leveraging Mondays also provides a recurring weekly cue to engage in healthy prevention behaviors and establish habitual thinking about sexual health.

Results

Man Up Monday and Woman Up Monday are two sex-positive creative campaigns that infuse cheekiness and humor into their sexual risk reduction messaging, while communicating the importance of HIV/STI testing and condom use. These campaigns leverage Monday to successfully increase testing numbers and in a variety of settings such as universities and local health clinics.

Conclusions

This session describes how organizations such as Planned Parenthood, Murray State University, and the University of Missouri have successfully used “Monday” campaigns to increase testing, and will provide several actionable tips for how to how leverage the “Monday Effect” to grow other sexual health campaigns.