The challenge:

Nationally, during the winter months there are 40,000 additional deaths among the over 65s. Many of these are avoidable. More locally, in one of our work areas, communities and services identified a need to reduce cold related deaths by increasing the number of over 65s having benefit, home energy and fire safety checks.

Our approach:

We used community led social marketing approaches to help teams gather audience insight by using one-to-one interviews and surveys. Together with our creative team, they used their insights to develop, and test, a series of approaches.

The real strength of this work was its dynamic engagement of target audiences across community networks, to attract people to ‘Snug as a Bug’ events and in behavior goals. Thirty local people were trained to deal with issues such as affordable warmth. They then targeted audiences using peer to peer approaches and encouraged them to complete ‘hotspot’ cards which requested follow up benefit and fuel poverty checks, and the fitting of smoke alarms.

Staff were targeted as a secondary audience and a dynamic alliance of local organisations was engaged to join up approaches.

The results:

In just four months:

• Five community action teams were created
• 674 contacts at local health fairs, supermarkets and community venues to raise awareness and get advice
• 25 Snug as a bug events were held, reaching 800 target community members
• Home Energy checks – prior to Snug as a Bug, average referrals were eight per month, after this increased to 35.66 per month
• Fire Safety checks – prior to Snug as a Bug, 25 referrals and 26 smoke alarms were fitted over a typical month period, during the four month campaign 247 referrals were made and 283 smoke alarms fitted
• The programme was extended for 2009 into the Keep Warm, Keep Well, Keep Safe campaign introducing the need for hand hygiene and flu vaccination (Keep Well) and Safeguarding Vulnerable adults (Keep Safe)