Bringing The Right Service To The Right People Makes It Better

Working out how to make a difference

Social marketing is fundamentally about knowing your audience and putting them at the centre of every decision you make. In short, social marketing begins and ends with your target audience.

The role of data planning is to obtain a deep understanding of the local population through data analysis. The diversity of populations means that employing a ‘one size fits all’ approach is unsuitable. It is therefore important to gain the right local picture to allow the social marketing campaign to have maximum impact. Successful social marketing relies on an in-depth knowledge of the target population to ensure that the right message is getting to the right people.

The Data People work as social marketing data planners within the public sector. Here is one of our case studies that shows the type of work we do in this space.

Yorkshire & Humber Strategic Health Authority (NHS)

The Brief

Coverage rates in the cervical screening programme in the Yorkshire and the Humber region are in rapid decline. If nothing is done to address this decline then Primary Care Trusts will struggle to meet the national coverage targets and many women will die needlessly. .

A social marketing intervention will be undertaken to halt the decline in attendance rates amongst 25-34 year olds. Our brief was to profile this age group to get a clearer understanding of which sections of society non-attendance of cervical screening is greatest so that a targeted research programme could be undertaken.

The Solution

The first challenge was to ascertain whether we could access data on non-attendees. We were able to access full post code data on non-attendance for each of the 14 PCTs in the SHA but no other data would be made available to protect patient confidentiality. Working in partnership with Yorkshire & Humber Public Health Observatory we profiled the non-attendance data against 5 geo-demographic classification systems. We analysed the data at regional and PCT level and split the age bands into 25-29 and 30-34 sub age bands. We also profiled the general female population for the above to allow for indexing.

The Results

The data analysis clearly showed a profile of non-attenders that was best summarised using Acorn - Group N (Struggling Families) was the dominant target audience. This group is consistently prevalent amongst all PCTs profiled with a high incidence of young single mums appearing to be a key feature after further analysis. This key audience comes out through all the classification systems. This will be a difficult group to influence but we now need to understand ‘why’ they are not attending their screenings and what messages and service offerings will positively influence their behaviour.