Community-wide Campaigns

Community-wide campaigns promote physical activity by combining a variety of strategies, such as media coverage and promotions, risk factor screening and education, community events, and policy and programmatic initiatives, such as walking trails or social supports. Community-wide campaigns are large-scale, high-visibility, high-intensity, and sustainable. Communities can bring multiple sectors together and use tested communication techniques to encourage physical activity with the following approach:

Events combined with multichannel messaging.

Community events such as walking groups at schools, worksites and malls, along with community health fairs that offer health risk appraisals can be combined with support groups, physical activity counseling, and multichannel messaging such as television, radio, newspaper columns and inserts, and trailers in movie theaters to promote community-wide physical activity campaigns.

Resources

Community-Wide Campaigns

Community-Wide Campaigns to Promote Physical Activity
This resource provides community practitioners with an overview, examples, and resources for comprehensive programs that use multiple intervention strategies across different settings in a community. It describes components of community-wide campaigns and includes a list of community implementation tools.

Organizing an Effective Community-Wide Physical Activity Campaign: A Step-by-Step Guide
This article explains how public health professionals can implement community-wide campaigns that encourage changes in physical activity behavior. The guide explains how to implement campaigns in a cost-effective, comprehensive way that may impact many people across an entire community or region. It describes the five phases of an effective campaign and outlines strategies to assess needs, plan, implement, and evaluate in communities.

Practitioners can use and adapt the following campaigns combined with events or community supports (e.g., social support, risk factor screening, health education) to promote physical activity in their communities.

Move Your Way
Move Your Way is the promotional campaign for the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, second edition. Campaign materials include fact sheets, posters, videos, interactive tools, and web badges.

State and Community Health Media Center*
This website has a collection of free and low-cost, audience-tested advertising and support materials produced by state and local health departments, nonprofit organizations, and federal agencies. These physical activity, nutrition, obesity, and chronic disease-related materials support programmatic efforts. Sample advertisements are available to view or request for use:

CDC VERB™ Campaign
Launched in 2002, this multicultural campaign aimed to increase and maintain physical activity among “tweens” (children aged 9 to 13). VERB™ used commercial methods of youth marketing to promote physical activity as cool, fun, and a chance to have a good time with friends.

*Can be used to help address equitable and inclusive access to physical activity

Read about other strategies

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