Creating a new ‘cause day’ for global obesity awareness
World Obesity Federation
World Obesity Federation represents professional members of the scientific, medical and research communities from over 50 regional and national obesity associations. Through its membership it creates a global community of organisations dedicated to solving the problems of obesity. Its mission is to lead and drive global efforts to reduce, prevent and treat obesity.
International
London,
GB
www.worldobesity.org
Success achieved
How the World Obesity Federation generated a ‘brand’ with global reach in their quest to end obesity.
- Website
- www.obesityday.worldobesity.org
- Project dates
- February 2016 - October 2016
Project team
The World Obesity Day team was led by:
- Ellie Needs, Head of Communications
- Hannah Brinsden, Head of Policy and Advocacy
- Tim Lobstein, Director of Policy
with support from the rest of the internal staff at the World Obsity Federation - Chris Trimmer, Rachel Leach, Alexander French, Heather Budd, Mohammad Qutub, Natasha Joyner.
Introduction
World Obesity Day was established in 2015 as an annual campaign with the goal of stimulating and supporting practical actions that will help people achieve and maintain a healthy weight and reverse the global obesity crisis. This year we were building on the work done throughout 2015 for the inaugural World Obesity Day (focused on adult obesity rates), to deliver a bigger and better campaign in 2016, with a specific focus on childhood obesity. Our main aim is to call on everyone to act now and demand for urgent, government action to end childhood obesity all around the world.
Discovery
The prevalence of infant, childhood and adolescent obesity is rising around the world. Obesity can negatively impact on a child’s immediate and long-term health, educational attainment and quality of life. While levels are plateauing in some countries and regions, the absolute numbers continue to rise, particularly in low and middle-income countries.
There have been several recent policy developments in the area of childhood obesity, not least the publication of the WHO Commission’s report on Ending Childhood Obesity, published in January 2016, and the subsequent Decision by Member states at the 69th World Health Assembly to welcome the report, and to develop national childhood obesity strategies. In addition, the European Commission’s European Child Obesity Strategy (2014) is up for review and implementation plans are being developed for the WHO Global Strategy on Women, Children and Adolescents Health and also the Decade of Action on Nutrition. The UK government has also recently published its Child Obesity Strategy.
The WHO NCD targets to halt the rise in obesity are relevant to this age group, and in global discussions on nutrition there is a push towards addressing ‘malnutrition in all its forms’, with a particular emphasis on children.
World Obesity Day will build on these opportunities, with data on projected prevalence and numbers, on likely comorbidities, and on trends in the drivers. It will identify priority areas for action while stating the need to change the framing of the problem and the need for cross-departmental solutions.
This will urge governments to build child obesity strategies based on the ECHO report, and identifying current best-practice examples of implementation. It will also acknowledge that a shift of the framing needs to take place, which recognises the need to invest in children’s health and to hold policy-makers and commercial operators to account.
Our role is then to disseminate this information and provide useful tools for our members and their members to use in their own country.
Although we are focusing on one topic each year our main aim is to raise awareness of obesity and it’s co-morbidities and highlight that it affects all demographics as well as economies.
The success of ‘cause’ days in bringing issues into the media spotlight is well-established. They present an almost guaranteed hook for media attention and opportunities for engaging the public and raising awareness.
Securing such days requires strong consensus on the need, and advocacy for official recognition. Ensuring effectiveness requires resources at the grassroots level. There are examples of effective use of this concept for obesity. For example, Latin America has an Obesity Awareness Day on 11th October. It was established in 1998 and has become a pivotal day for obesity on the continent ever since. The UK’s National Obesity Awareness Week gains attention each January, helped in no small part by media appetite to address the issue of weight gain after the Christmas season.
We felt that now is the right time to have a single World Obesity Day which could use centrally provided, but localisable materials to communicate powerfully the impact of obesity on people’s lives, on health systems and economies and also highlight the innovative initiatives being undertaken around the world to tackle obesity.
Objectives
- Encourage more member associations to undertake high profile media campaigns
- Increase public and policymaker understanding of the challenge of obesity, and what can be done to tackle it
- Share national experiences of campaigning to enable the spread of best practices
- Obtain ratification of World Obesity Day from WHO
Timeline
We started work on World Obesity Day in early 2016 to establish the theme and gather the background data. Due to staff capacity we didn’t start working intensively on the day until summer 2016, and the day wasn’t promoted until 2 months out from the day.
Activities
To achieve the objectives outlined above we needed to plan a multi-faceted campaign. Integral to this was the development of 4 key areas:
1. Development of a theme
World Obesity Day - childhood obesity stamp.
First we had to agree the theme (childhood obesity) and our call to action “This World Obesity Day we are calling for urgent government action to end childhood obesity”
2. The exclusive global data and projections from our in-house research team
We based the campaign messaging on the data that the research team have spent months working on. Our data team provide bespoke data and prevalence maps for countries all over the world for different demographics as part of our organisation’s priority work. They gathered the most up to date and accurate data and put together current statistics alongside future projections for childhood obesity rates. We worked with Wiley, the publisher of 4 of our federation journals, to publish an academic paper based on this research so that it could be released to coincide with World Obesity Day. This would be integral to the campaign as this is what will be picked up by the media (the full data set is embargoed for release on the day itself).
3. The creation of a brand identity for World Obesity Day
World Obesity Day did not have a brand identity, other than a logo, when it launched in 2015, so our main challenge for 2016 was to create this. Not only did we need to create something new, we also needed to develop a brand that can adapt for future years with different themes.
4. The creation of a mico-site
This allowed us to host the majority of our information and materials which would allow easy global access (and self-service of materials) and a signposting tool for further information. It also meant we were better able to measure activity and engagement.
These 4 things gave us the foundations to create the content of the campaign. We produced a number of tools for our members and others to use, most of which were accessible via our website:
Main global infographic
Infographics:
Last year we provided bespoke data sheets for our members (50 countries all over the world). This year we went one better and designed infographics which we tailored for our 52 members with their country-specific data as well as translated them into around 30 languages. We sent these to each of our member organisations in advance of the day, and published them all on our website for download the day before World Obesity Day to coincide with the data release We also versioned these for both print and online sharing.
Newsletter communications:
We created a newsletter which we sent out weekly for 6 weeks before the day. This was sent to anyone who signs up to receive it from our website – a number which grew considerably as the build-up to the campaign went on. These emails averaged a click rate of 35% and included examples of activities planned by our members or supporters with the aim of sparking ideas for others.
Social Media:
We produced a comprehensive social media plan for both of our platforms (LinkedIn and Twitter), culminating in scheduled tweets every 15 minutes on World Obesity Day, as well as intensive reactive activity on the day. We based this around the hashtag #WorldObesityDay. Because we are global, a ‘cause day’ in effect means a 72 hour period for us from build up to completion.
Advocacy toolkit
For those in a position to do more targeted advocacy in their country or community, we created advice on how to go about it.
We produced a template letter to health ministers and are asking members and supporters to send this out. It calls on governments to implement the commitments they made as part of the WHO NCD action plan.
We produced a general template letter which can be tailored by members / regions / organisations on the obesity crisis with appropriate local figures on childhood obesity.
Online Interactive map
Online interactive map
We created an interactive map of the world showing where activities are taking place on World Obesity Day to help show the breadth of support.
E-learning
We made one of our e-learning modules free for 2 weeks over World Obesity Day (Management of Obesity in Children and Adolescents).
With all of the above in place we put together a PR plan for engagement with the media. We produced a press release which was embargoed for the weekend before World Obesity Day, with an exclusive deal negotiated with the Guardian Newspaper, who published a front page article for World Obesity Day 2015.
We also worked closely with Wiley to put their own press release out based on the journal article/ data. As a partner of ours, Wiley also promoted for us on their social media channels, through their email newsletters and through banners on the journal webpages.
We worked closely with our members, communicating with them on the lead up to the day and providing them with materials ahead of the public so that they were able to disseminate to the local community and also have time to request tailored information (i.e. translations).
We also worked with other champions and advocates of World Obesity Federation to ensure they had all the information they needed to publicly support our cause. This was primarily down through social media.
Challenges
The ongoing issues are immense. We have created a new website this year so that World Obesity Day can have a year-round presence. We plan to continue to offer advice, data and resources through the site for this year’s topic of Childhood obesity, as well as start the campaign for 2017 later in the year (focusing on the cost of obesity worldwide). The World Obesity Day site is a public facing portal which links through to
our organization’s site where visitors can find more bespoke data and information relevant to them should they require it.
One of the main initial challenges, as ever in science, was to ‘translate’ the raw data to make it accessible to the public. We needed to make our messaging concise and clear, yet maintaining its accuracy. Producing the infographics was a great solution for this as they are accessible and understandable to most, whilst also getting the (sometimes shocking) statistics relayed.
It’s also incredibly difficult to run a global campaign from the UK and keeping a worldwide view on everything. Whether that’s having an understanding of the issues facing each country, being culturally sensitive, using materials with appropriate imagery or simply communicating with them in their time zone! Clearly it’s easier for us to forge relationships locally and have a larger impact within our own country and other English speaking countries. But we worked hard to engage our membership base and mobilise the ‘local’ workforce. We translated over 30 of our infographics and tailored versions for over 50 different countries (some in multiple languages) to ensure we were providing materials that were relevant for each audience.
One unforeseen issue came from the use of imagery by the media and other organisations in relation to the campaign day. We found that quite a lot of negative imagery was being used when media were talking about obesity on World Obesity Day. We used the opportunity to call people out on their use of negative imagery and signposted to our new obesity image gallery providing stigma-free images of people with obesity (free to use).
Achievements
World Obesity Day 2016 dramatically improved on results from 2015. We are still working on the full evaluation of the day but we have some great statistics emerging:
Supporters
A total of 175 organisations pledged support, ran events or supported World Obesity Day in some way. We plotted a number of the key events on an interactive map on our campaign website.
Media coverage
We have tallied over 80 news stories in the media around World Obesity Day.
Thunderclap
We had a target of 100 supporters of our Thunderclap campaign. We totalled 267 supporters during a 6 week campaign with a social media reach of 6,582,764 (compared with 185,653 in 2015).
Twitter statistics
14.000 tweets used the hashtag #worldobesityday during 72 hours, with a record of 275 tweets in one hour alone on 11th October. We gained 542 followers during the 72 hours, compared to only 204 the previous year; there were 459 click-througths, up from 372 and 526 liked tweets, compared to 122 in 2015. Also, a multitude of influencers and VIPs engaged in the conversation and supported us on the day.
Newsletter comms
A total of 8 newsletters sent out over the period of 2 months. Readership increased from 197 at start of 2016 campaign to 1121 by final email all through active sign-ups (this is NOT including member communications)
Website traffic
11,176 sessions from launch (25 Aug) to 18th Oct (2,516 0n 11th).
Journal article in Paediatric Obesity
We published our exclusive data projections for obesity rates globally in Paediatric Obesity. The article has attained an Altmetrics score of 354 (that’s within the top 5% off all research outputs scored by Altmetric). The Altmetric score is the highest of all articles published in a World Obesity journal since they have been tracked and it rates very highly in general – especially considering it’s a ‘new’ article.
E-learning
For 2 weeks over the time of the campaign, we offered an free module on our elearning platform (Management of Obesity in Children and Adolescents). A total of 548 Healthcare professionals registered to take the module.
What would we do differently?
We would start earlier! It’s hard to plan too much far in advance, and especially so with a small team when there are other pulls on our time. But ideally we would give ourselves a longer lead time and start promoting the day earlier in the year. Unfortunately in order to promote something, all of the thinking and content needs to be in place (which is what takes the time), especially when you are creating a new ‘brand’. Now that we have laid the groundwork and established the ‘day’, with an engaging website and established following through our digital channels, 2017 will be much more straightforward to launch into.
We would ensure that the platform we were using enabled us to track downloads. Unfortunately we were not able to track how many of our infographics were downloaded from the website, we can just see how many users visited the page. Ideally we would be tracking which graphics were downloaded and where they were used.
I would also like to have the budget to pay for social media tracking. We know that our hashtag trended in at least 4 parts of the world and it would be fantastic to be able to drill down in more depth to the analytics.
As with everything we do, reaching a global audience is tough. I think next year we will look to translate more of our campaign materials and information in the hope that it will encourage more people to use it.
We would, perhaps, also look at using the campaign as a potential fundraising tool. We did link the campaign to our existing JustGiving page but we did not promote this at all as fundraising was not one of our objectives. Potentially World Obesity Day could becoming a fundraising tool as well as being an information dissemination and ‘action’ campaign.
