01 Dec 2016

Raising awareness around workplace health and engaging the public

Topics

Raising awareness around workplace health, engaging the public and increasing social media stats - how the British Dietetic Association used social media as part of their annual campaign #DietitiansWeek

British Dietetic Association

The BDA is the largest association of food and nutrition professionals in the UK and is the only body in the UK representing the whole of the dietetic workforce. With 12,000 members, the BDA is both a professional body and trade union representing the professional, educational, public and workplace interests of our members. The BDA has approximately 80% of the dietitians registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) as members.

National
www.bda.uk.com

Success achieved

Website: https://www.bda.uk.com
Project dates: February - June 2016

Project team

Dietitians Week was facilitated by the Dietitians Week Team, led by Tom Embury, Public Affairs Officer
And the BDA Social Media Team, led by Danni Wood, Communications Officer.
This along with direction from the BDA Communications and Marketing Board.

Introduction

Dietitians Week is an annual week-long campaign promoting the importance of the impact and value of dietitians, the only legally regulated nutrition professionals. The campaign was launched by the BDA in 2014 and the 2016 week ran from Monday June 6 - Friday June 10.

This year the campaign aimed to promote the importance of workplace health, with absenteeism and presenteeism costing UK workplaces £23 billion per year. Social media was the key platform for the campaign.

Discovery

The theme of Dietitians Week 2016 was workplace health aiming to highlight the importance of employers looking after their employees’ health, which is both beneficial to the health of the workforce and financially beneficial to organisations. The campaign further aimed to show how dietitians can have a positive impact and help employers’ to provide a healthy workplace and create a healthy workforce.

We also wanted to encourage dietitians to lead by example, so social media was a great way to get our members involved. Each day of the campaign took on a different subtheme of workplace health including food and mood, healthy meetings, lunch breaks, hydration, and food and movement.

Our overall marketing strategy focuses on promoting the dietetic profession and highlighting dietitians as the leaders in the nutrition arena, and this campaign is an extension of that strategy.

One difficulty we faced was the fact that at the time the planning for this event began, only 30% of our members were active on social media which meant we needed to encourage our members to create social media accounts so that they would be able to get involved with the campaign.

Objectives

The aim of Dietitians Week was to generate positivity amongst members and to draw public attention to the importance of workplace health and how dietitians can help play a key role in supporting this area.

We aimed to:

Have 100 participants for our Thunderclap,
50 participants per day for our poll questions
50 participants for our lunchtime photo activity.
Obtain 10 items of press coverage (print or radio) in local or national outlets
Encourage more of our members to create social media accounts.

Activities

Ahead of the campaign, we produced a Media Kit for free download by our members. This contained documents to assist members in contacting journalists, so they could obtain media coverage for themselves and the campaign too. This along with a calendar of planned social media activity to encourage involvement from our members, and so that members could plan in time to get involved.

The Media Kit also outlined our hashtag: #DietitiansWeek. Additionally, the Kit included the BDA’s Professional Social Media Guidance document to encourage those who weren’t already using platforms like Twitter and Facebook, to get involved.

The Media Kit was promoted on our social media channels and also via our member magazine and monthly enewsletter to make sure we reached a wider audience. The Media Kit took approximately 1-2 weeks to produce, with involvement from the design team to make it visually appealing. Production of the Media Kit began in February 2016, and was promoted from March 2016 until the campaign started in June.

Several articles were placed within our monthly members’ magazine in the lead up to Dietititans Week (from February 2016 to May 2016) to encourage participation in the social media campaign and also to encourage people to sign up to Twitter and Facebook. For example, we had several of our members write articles about the benefits of dietitians using Twitter. The aim of this was to increase more members to be involved in the campaign.

A month ahead of the event, we sent emails to influential members, for example those who are involved with our Specialist Groups and to our Media Spokespeople, to make sure they would lead the way in getting involved with our social media activity.

The week before the event, we distributed a press release about workplace health to widen the reach of our social media campaign.

During the event, social media channels were monitored by members of the BDA Social Media Team.

To increase reach, we encouraged people to register for our Thunderclap – an automated tweet to announce the campaign launch. BDA members were encouraged to sign up via Twitter, Facebook and member e-newsletters from February 2016 to the event week.

We had five graphics promoting the sub-theme of each day and pinned these to the top of our Twitter accounts, to remind people of the day’s subtheme. The graphics were also used on Facebook. This was approximately a days work to develop the graphics.

Each campaign day featured a Twitter poll from 9am-2pm, asking about an element of workplace health. An example question is: "Do you skip your lunchbreak when you’re at work? #DietitiansWeek".

The audience for the poll questions included members and the public, so questions were not exclusively dietetic. The preparation for this took approximately 3 days of work.

A Poll Response Statement outlining how a dietitian can help in relation to each poll question topic was posted on our website each day after the poll closed and promoted via Facebook and Twitter.
For example, in relation to above, the statement discussed why taking a lunch break is important and how a dietitian can help employees have a healthy lunch. Again this took approximately 2-3 days of work, reading through various drafts, researching information, proofreading and getting sign off.

*Campaign followers having lunch together*

On Wednesday June 8, we asked our followers to tweet pictures of themselves eating lunch away from their desk, to encourage healthy lunch breaks. Our members were the main target, with the hope that the online conversation would remind other allied health professionals (and the public) to take breaks too. We also produced a lunch sign for members to order from the BDA and then spend time mindfully colouring in, to then use in the lunch photo activity.

Challenges

Catering for a mixed audience including the public, the media and members/dietitians. Workplace health impacts a large percentage of the population, so thankfully the topic is quite relevant to the majority of our audience – whether someone is an employer, an employee or someone who has a friend or relative whose workplace may impact on their health. We tailored our daily subthemes to be general topics including hydration and food and movement, which again are relevant to most people. Linking these themes back to the role of the dietitian helped to appeal to this segment of our audience too.

Encouraging more members to sign up to social media channels, so that they could get involved with the campaign and continue to promote themselves and the profession afterwards on an ongoing basis. We addressed this by promoting the importance of using social media to members via other communication channels including our print magazine.

Ensuring the campaign was promoted well enough in advance so that members could plan in time to get involved was another consideration. Many of our members are working in hospitals and have little spare time during the working day, so it was important that activities, such as the poll questions, were open for long periods of time so that as many people as possible could get involved.

Achievements

The aim of 100 Thunderclap participants was surpassed quickly, and the final result saw 215 people participate – 215% up on our target. This tweet increased the reach of the campaign as social media users that follow people who signed up to our Thunderclap, were made aware of
the campaign too.

Overall we had 570 voters for our Twitter polls which increased traffic to our Twitter site (people signed in to take part in the poll and again to see the post-poll statement) and key workplace health issues were highlighted which was a campaign aim. Additionally by posting the Poll Response Statement on our website each day, and promoting this via social media, we increased traffic to our website.

During the Wednesday lunch time photo activity, approximately 100 people tweeted pictures of their healthy lunch break. This activity widened the reach of the work of dietitians and the campaign, whilst showcasing dietitians as leaders in nutrition, as other health professionals participated in taking photographs including nurses and physiotherapists, which was a key campaign aim. The activity also generated the positivity that we aimed for as there was a lot of enthusiasm generated from people taking their lunchbreaks together.

Targets & Statistics

Here are Twitter stats for our @DietitiansWeek account during the campaign month:

Tweets: 386
Tweet impressions: 205K
Profile visits: 6511
Mentions: 577
New followers: 237

Here are Twitter stats for our @BrDieteticAssoc account during the campaign month – we had approximately double the amount of profile visits than an ordinary month:

Tweets: 56
Tweet impressions: 195K
Profile visits: 10.1K
Mentions: 1K
New followers: 274

We also:

Increased our Facebook likes throughout the week by 50+.
More of our BDA Specialist Groups and BDA Branches opened Twitter accounts ahead of the event, so they could participate.
Received 30 items of press coverage in local and national papers.

What would we do differently?

We would start planning even earlier! For example, for the 2017 event, we started planning in September 2016 – nine months ahead of the event rather than six.
In addition, having a subtheme for each day made things a little complex, so perhaps this is something we would change for next time, to ensure our message is clear.
We are also increasing our targets and success metrics.

Feedback & Testimonials

“The Dietitians at LYPFT really enjoyed the theme this year and feel that our staff did as well. Overall feedback was really positive from staff teams.”

Quote from evaluation survey

“Promoting our profession with exciting themes enabled us to engage with visitors and other staff in the building that we would normally just pass in a rush.”