Department of Health and Social Care and Paragon DCX
Using Apteco software to deliver an evidence-based email programme aiming to inspire and support families to become healthier
Background
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) support ministers in the UK in leading the nation’s health and social care - to help people live more independent, healthier lives, for longer. When developing policies and guidelines, it is the Department’s aim to motivate and support millions more people to make and sustain changes that will improve their health, with policies and guidelines that will improve healthcare outcomes by providing high-quality and sustainable care at the right time in the right place, and by improving infrastructure and transforming technology.
The challenge
Better Health 'Healthy Steps' behaviour change project
The primary aim of the campaign was to encourage and support families to adopt more healthy lifestyle behaviours, leading with nutrition but also covering physical activity, family wellbeing and parental health, with an emphasis on cost where appropriate.
By impacting behaviours of the families, the campaign also needed to generate robust learnings, both to measure effectiveness and identify how best to grow and improve the programme offering, should it prove effective. Targeting families with school-age children, with an emphasis towards those in lower socio demographic groups and living in areas with higher levels of deprivation, support would be provided digitally to these groups (predominantly via email).
Watch the full customer story
Watch our video which covers the full impact of Apteco marketing software on the Department of Health and Social Care, presented by Orla Hugueniot, Josh Hind and Matt Foord.
The Apteco Solution
Using Apteco for the end-to-end delivery brought efficiencies to the process through FastStats selections for audiences, personalisation, and journey definition, while PeopleStage managed the complexities of the journey workflow with ease. All measurement and registrant profiling was carried out in Orbit and meant that tangible benefits to the UK population were measured quickly.
Using both experience and evidence from previous Government campaigns, DHSC and Paragon DCX developed the email programme with bite size chunks of information that would move parents on step-by-step, showing how the collective impacts of small steps can add up to big differences to their family’s health. They also recognised that people’s issues will be different, so they offered a choice of varying content by the issues that mattered most to them.
Four key channels were chosen to help promote the Healthy Steps programme – acquisition emails, social media, paid search, and partnership activities - encouraging individuals to sign up to the campaign via the registration page. Here they were asked a series of questions to help identify what topics would be best suited to help them and their family. These results were compiled into a question and response pair table in the underlying database, which was then passed into FastStats. A scoring model was used to determine what programme journey and themed communications each registrant would benefit from the best, based on their responses. These themes were designed to provide a journey of informative articles and set challenges to help families improve either their intake of fruit and veg each day, meal preparation and a reduction in their intake of sugary snacks and drinks.
The programme then proceeded to introduce the recipients to their theme and set challenges across the journey. Each person was set four weekly challenges across the span of the entire journey with an opportunity to provide feedback on how they got on directly within the email content. These responses are captured within the PeopleStage communication history and reported within Orbit by theme. This enabled the Healthy Steps project team to monitor the performance of each challenge and its suitability within the campaign.
Healthy Steps is a critical program helping to tackle childhood obesity, working together with DCX and the Apteco platform we have delivered an automated eight week comms journey and showing amazing results in the pilot phase.
Orla Hugueniot, Head of Early Years Marketing Programmes, Department of Health and Social Care
Orla Hugueniot, Head of Early Years Marketing Programmes, Department of Health and Social Care
The impact on the business
The programme was a success, creating positive behaviour shifts across the nation. Often this has near doubled the percentages of those doing the positive behaviour, and near halved those who were engaging in negative behaviours. As a result of using Apteco, DHSC now has great agility to test, learn and implement updates to support continuous improvement and new features. In the future they will look forward to building this campaign into a multi-channel programme, and to using additional technologies such as WhatsApp to support in communicating with those hard-to-reach users who are often the most vulnerable.
The potential in future to build this campaign into a multi-channel programme and use additional technologies, such as WhatsApp.
Dashboards provided a comprehensive actionable evaluation report with full recommendations for programme enhancements.
Clever use of banding and template functionality allowed DHSC to save on ongoing development costs.
75% of participants said there was an overall improvement to their family’s health and wellbeing, and 69% saw an improvement in levels of fruit and veg consumption.
51% said they had decreased their child’s snacks per day and 49% said their kids had increased the amount of physical activity they did.
At the end of the programme 60% agreed with the statement ‘I am happy with my family’s overall health and wellbeing’, a considerable increase from 35% at the start!
We’ve been supporting the DHSC team to help the nation live healthier lives for 17 years, and citizen data has always been critical for both activity and measurement. Apteco software has been instrumental in both improving the accessibility of data and insight, and in increasing efficiency in campaigns.
Sally Phillips, Head of Data and Systems, Paragon DCX
Sally Phillips, Head of Data and Systems, Paragon DCX