Communicating the vision of a smokefree generation

Digital resources that could be used to target local authorities

To communicate a vision of a smokefree generation by the year 2025, to capture efforts in realising the vision with digital resources that could be used to target local authorities across the region in order to fulfil the following objectives:

• Make it easy for local authorities and health organisations to understand the vision and sign up to it.
• Make it easy for the vision to become their main policy for tackling smoking prevalence.
• Empower local authorities to adopt the brand and digital resources to unite regional campaigns and efforts.
• Ensure local authorities upload their efforts on the website so that as a region, we can archive all efforts.

Empowering influencers to spread the word

We first set about creating the name and brand concepts; linking to clean air, childhood innocence, community empowerment and celebration, we delivered the ‘Breathe 2025’ concept with its cool blue colours, moving balloons and ‘ribbon’ font.

With a reasonably low budget versus quite a big ambition, our strategy was all about being smart and ensuring we got buy-in from communications, PR and health board leaders in local authorities to ensure the Breathe 2025 vision was network marketed for us through their communications channels reaching health services, schools, organisations and eventually the public.

The strategy

• Create an online platform that can capture all efforts, promotes a strong united voice across one region, empowers organisations and individuals to get involved and captures data that we can use to promote how well the region is performing
• Write and produce a compelling vision film that captures the essence of the project, sets the scene, explains the vision and gets those that see it revved up to join Breathe 2025
• Create a comprehensive set of resources that speak to varying audiences and inspires them to make the Breathe 2025 brand and vision go further – we don’t have a marketing budget so essentially this pack has to get people to do our marketing for us

Making pledges

We developed a pledge site that allows users to agree to the vision, make a unique pledge, select a pre-populated pledge, make a video pledge and share pledges.

As well as pledging, users can read about recent smoking cessation big wins, view facts about smoking in the region, access useful resources and join the pledge wall that celebrates everyone’s efforts.

The site has an overhanging countdown clock to make the vision real. Users can enter a simple step-by-step process for pledging which ends with them receiving a personalised certificate and email.

The database allows us to communicate to those that have pledged and download data in order to analyse the efforts by city, town and postcode.

The site is responsive and has built in capabilities to grow. The original proposed designs allowed users to see efforts by location and efforts nearest to them. It was decided that this capability will be launched when we reach 2025 pledges which expect to see happen in the first year.