Social Marketing on a Dime

A simple refrigerator magnet is leading to bigger and better things for the Albuquerque Alliance for Active Living community partnership. Over the last year, Joanne McEntire, the partnership's director from the 1000 Friends of New Mexico, has spearheaded a social marketing campaign designed for the Vecinos del Bosque neighborhood. The low-budget campaign and its main component, a refrigerator magnet, aimed to encourage walking among the neighborhood's women.

McEntire and her team set out to design a campaign to prompt residents of this largely-Hispanic community to use ditch banks, areas adjacent to irrigation ditches that had long been informal walking paths, for routine physical activity. "Walking is simply not the norm for this community," McEntire explains, as there are few walkable destinations and residents' jobs do not allow for much free or leisure time. In addition to these challenges, the Albuquerque Alliance had limited funds for research, implementation, and evaluation of their efforts.

Thus, the campaign would have to be effective (utilizing messages that are most relevant for this audience) and efficient (maximizing outcomes while minimizing expenditures). As a result, the team conducted informal research that would inform messaging and audience choice. They also relied on existing research focused on comparable New Me

Casual focus groups conducted at Vecinos del Bosque Neighborhood Association meetings provided invaluable cultural insights. As the team suspected, men and women in this community serve markedly different roles in the family. Women, typically older ones, serve as the caregivers and guardians and tend to put their families' needs above their own. They are the leaders and maintainers of multiple social ties, including those among family and friends. The importance of social networks for Vecinos del Bosque women became apparent to the social marketing team. This core value, in addition to simple message testing, informed the campaign's refrigerator magnet text: Take a Friend/ For a Walk/ For Your Health.

Creation and distribution of the magnet was also greatly influenced by community participation. In fact, McEntire found her magnet models while walking on a ditch bank in the community one evening. Rosalee and Marianne, who would soon be known as the "Ditch Divas," truly represented the women the social marketing campaign hoped to reach. They are evidence, as McEntire points out, that understanding the community's people and their values are of paramount importance at every stage of the process. Accordingly, one of the keys to successfully understanding their audience was treating them as trusted, knowledgeable partners as opposed to "targets" or "recipients" of services. Ultimately, the team distributed five hundred English and five hundred Spanish magnets by hand or at events in the very community that helped create them.

"This tiny little magnet on a refrigerator," McEntire says, is propelling the partnership on to bigger and better things. The New Mexico Department of Health recognized the magnet's potential as the foundation for a larger social marketing effort. It is expanding the campaign to include 60 to 90 radio spots and create 2,500 informational rack cards for local clinics. America on the Move will also partner with 1000 Friends of New Mexico to widely distribute rack cards to clinics, including several that treat a large number of Hispanic women. "There is still an enormous amount of work to be done," McEntire concludes, but with a solid, cost effective research base and the financial help and distribution channels of partners, they are certainly well on their way.

Resources

Vecinos del Bosque Neighborhood Association Website

1000 Friends of New Mexico site on the Albuquerque Alliance for Active Living

Take a Friend for a Walk Radio Spot - Spanish (.mp3 audio, 970 KB)

Magnet PDF: in English   en Espanol

Albuquerque Alliance for Active Living Community Profile