Skin cancer awareness - engaging young people for behaviour change
We worked with Merseyside and Cheshire Cancer Network (MCCN) on an innovative social marketing approach to engage with 11-17 year olds and their parents about the dangers of sun exposure and sun bed use. This included the development of an educational programme to be delivered through schools, to support long-term behaviour change.
Our social marketing team gathered insight from the two target audience groups. This highlighted key parental influences, as well as the young people’s drivers and barriers to behaviour change. Crucially, our research also examined different communications methods and the form of message delivery they would be most likely to respond to.
Using this insight, we developed an e-learning tool called Mini Me, a social networking web application which allows students to create virtual personas of themselves and accumulate points by answering quiz questions and tackling real-life scenarios.
The principle behind this discrete, managed system is to support behaviour change, by encouraging each young person to make an informed choice about sun bathing and sun beds. Mini Me can also be linked to ‘real world’ performance in areas such as school attendance, and lesson plans are currently being developed to enable teachers to integrate it into PSHE education lessons.
In addition to addressing skin cancer, we envisage using this innovative e-learning tool in a range of educational settings to tackle related health and change issues, such as alcohol, smoking and drugs.
