ActivEAT Project start and end date: February to June 2010 Location: All 20 Well London areas Costs: Well London funding of 21,500 ( 12,000 Eatwell, 9,500 Wellnet communications and events) Well London partner: London Sustainability Exchange Local delivery partner: Local ActivEAT champions in Hackney, Ealing, Waltham Forest, Haringey, Lewisham, Newham, Southwark, Greenwich, Camden, Hounslow, Enfield, Westminster, Lambeth and Croydon. Well London project: Eatwell/Wellnet Overview This project combined face to face social marketing with a new media approach to promote healthy eating among young people, using sport to motivate them. Local football coaches were recruited and trained as ActivEAT Champions, who promoted healthy eating to their players using social marketing techniques, and brought players to a healthy eating for sport taster event in central London. The Champions also encouraged their teams to enter the ActivEAT Penalty Shootout, an online game that promoted healthy eating to the players and their friends. ActivEAT led up to the Well London World Cup in June 2010, a football tournament organised by Central YMCA for teams from across the Well London areas where ActivEAT delivered wider healthy eating promotion. Aims To promote healthy eating for sport (football) to young people in the Well London areas To provide healthy eating learning/training to young people To cascade this learning from the young people to their friends, family and local community to achieve increased confidence, awareness and ability of people living in the Well London communities to eat healthily Background Integration of projects was a key aspect of the Well London approach and ActivEAT did this through linking two of the Well London strands, Healthy Eating and Physical Activity, in the lead up to the Well London World Cup in June 2010. Well London healthy eating activity was already being delivered in all Well London areas through Cook & Eat activities and Community Feasts, but ActivEAT was envisaged as a way to deliver more intensive and targeted promotion of healthy eating with a particular focus on young people, who had previously had limited engagement.
Activate London, the physical activity strand of Well London led by CYMCA, had already worked with sports coaches across many of the Well London areas. Sports projects had been one of the most successful methods of engaging with young people, and ActivEAT built on this to promote healthy eating, aiming to tackle high levels of junk food consumption among young people in the Well London areas. The challenges faced in promoting healthier eating to youth are illustrated in comments from the sports coaches engaged through the project: Lack of access to healthy foods is a barrier. If you have parents who can only afford to give children 2 lunch money and there s a Chicken Cottage where for 2 you can get four chicken breasts, two wings, apple pie and a coke then the kids are going to go there. So definitely a lack of money is an issue. There are loads of adverts for sports drinks like Lucozade/Powerade for sports but no advertising for healthy eating for sports Approach ActivEAT approached coaches that had been involved with Activate London about involvement in a healthy eating project, and contracted them as ActivEAT Champions to promote healthy eating to their teams for the duration of the project. The project then had several stages: Training event for Champions Healthy Eating event for young people Viral marketing campaign ActivEAT Penalty Shootout Well London World Cup Training event for Champions The training event for the Champions included a presentation and discussion on healthy eating for sport by Gavin Allinson, a sports nutritionist who works with the England Rugby team, and a session on social marketing led by the viral marketing design agency to explore barriers and motivators around healthy eating for young people and inform the development of the ActivEAT Penalty Shootout. The Champions were also informed about monitoring and evaluation requirements and provided with promotional materials, including postcards with 5 top tips developed by LSx and Gavin Allinson. Following the event, the Champions carried out healthy eating promotion at sports sessions with the young people they coached. Healthy Eating event for young people ActivEAT ran an event for young people from all the Champions teams to try a range of new, healthy foods and receive nutrition advice from Gavin Allinson. The event consisted of an introductory talk from Gavin, followed by interactive tasting sessions where Gavin described the health benefits of 4 food and beverage types: carbohydrates, dips and vegetables; breakfast and fruit; healthy smoothies; and post-exercise snacks. The young people tasted them, asked questions and wrote comments on the tables, which ranged from I think the food is really good and I will try to eat this more often when I need a snack, I ve never tried tomato hummus before, yum! and jaw dropping to urgh!. The event ended with a coaching session by Chelsea coaches, which the Champions advised was necessary to attract the young people in the first place, and enabled them to test their stamina following their healthy snacks. Viral marketing campaign ActivEAT Penalty Shootout Alongside the social marketing carried out through the coaches and the healthy eating event, ActivEAT developed an online penalty shootout game that promoted healthy eating, both through gaining points for eating a healthy snack or drinking water, and through promoting the ActivEAT 5 top tips. The Champions promoted this to their players, with the aim of cascading the healthy eating messages of the campaign to the friends and families of the players. A prize of new kit was given to the team with the highest overall score. The game was also promoted to all the players
signing up to the Well London World Cup being organised by Activate London, as it was based on the same website. However, this did mean for security reasons the game could not be linked to facebook, which affected its viral spread. While the ActivEAT Penalty Shootout was popular with most of the young people that played it, many of them lacked access to the internet at home and the Champions had to arrange specific trips to libraries for them to play it. This had an impact on the ability of the game to spread virally, and is an important consideration for any project that uses technology or the internet. Well London World Cup ActivEAT took place in the build up to the Well London World Cup tournament, a football competition for teams from the Well London areas. Over 600 young people took part and over 1200 people attended. At the event, in addition to the sporting competition and workshops run by the arts strand of Well London, Be Creative, Be Well, ActivEAT ran a healthy eating stall with a smoothie bike and gave away free fruit and healthy eating information. The stall was very popular with both the players and their families, and over 475 people tasted smoothies made on the bike, with many more tasting the fruit, all of which was seasonal and locally sourced as much as possible. Evaluation Evaluation took place through a number of methodologies. Each event was evaluated through asking the attendees how their knowledge and awareness about healthy eating had been affected, whilst the Champions evaluated the impact of their healthy eating promotion through baseline and follow up surveys with their players. At the Champion training, 54% of attendees reported feeling quite confident about healthy eating for sport. Afterwards this improved to 23% quite and 46% Very confident. The healthy eating event was attended by 35 young people and 11 ActivEAT Champions. Before the event started, only 2 said they ate 5 or more portions of fruit and vegetables per day, and 34 had eaten junk food in the past week. Following the event, 18 said they were going to try and eat more fruit and vegetables. 80% of attendees reported feeling Not Very or Quite confident about healthy eating for sport, with only 20% reporting being Very confident. This increased to 76% feeling Very confident after the event. The Champions reported promoting healthy eating for sport to at least 564 young people. The baseline and follow up surveys they carried out with players faced challenges as different pools of players were available to complete the baseline and follow up in several cases, and it is difficult to assess the impact of raising awareness about healthy eating on the honesty of the responses. The outcomes were overall quite similar, with slight increases in reported fruit and vegetable
consumption. However, many Champions reported positive outcomes among their players as a result of the healthy eating promotion and the ActivEAT events. Reported outcomes included: They [the players] have stopped bringing fizzy drinks to coaching and bring 1 litre bottles of water instead after training they eat fruit instead of going down McDonalds. It has changed the way they play which is really good. They are more active and run more. When one kid says something is good, the rest follows. It takes one to change the cycle. They ve told their parents. Parents have come up to me and said, do you know what my son told me about this or that. The Champions estimate for the number of people that their healthy eating promotion reached in addition to their direct interventions with players was 601. However, if a standard extrapolation for young people s interventions is applied, of 2.4 (average family size in London) then the total audience for ActivEAT through the Champions can be estimated as 1,354. When including the 14 Champions themselves the total reached is 1,368. Outcomes All the champions reported that they would continue to promote healthy eating to their teams; only two of them did this to some extent already. On a regular basis they coach over 750 young people, so the ongoing audience as they continue to promote healthy eating is significant. One Champion reported that the Top Tips cards had been integrated into their healthy eating strategy and they were copying and using them on a regular basis. All of the Champions were keen for more projects of this type and more promotional materials and events. There were also a lot of reports that the players had spread healthy eating behaviour further, out to their families in particular but also to other young people. This was a really positive outcome. One Champion described their players as like beacons and living it [healthy eating messages] themselves. Another reported We ve tried to get the kids involved in things like shopping at home. The youngsters have become ambassadors to parents. Recommendations Integrating across projects is a great way of reaching new audiences; Well London healthy eating activity had previously mainly reached families and women, but using sport as a hook enabled large numbers of young people to be engaged Using trusted expert sources such as the nutritionist who had links to the England Rugby team was very effective in engaging both the Champions and the young people, as he had credibility as a trusted source Using the Champions as trusted sources for the young people, who they are accustomed to listening to and learning from, was a useful way of getting messages across Identifying appropriate incentives for participation for example the coaching session at the healthy eating event, using coaches from a well known club, was a useful way of attracting attendees Recruiting and retaining participation of champions for any project is very time consuming a lot of time has to be spent on the phone and relationship building is important to get them to take part fully and to remind them to carry out project requirements
Planning an intensive project takes a lot of time and creative thinking and input from as many people as possible who have experience of the audience and what will appeal is vital. Champion recommendations were key for deciding on prizes, for example, and identifying that a coaching session was vital to attract players to the healthy eating event Awareness of technological limitations; while it is often assumed that internet access is available everywhere in the UK, many families and young people do not have regular access to computers or the internet. The project was also affected by an inability to use social networking (facebook) due to the security risks for the Well London World Cup event; all these sort of factors must be considered when planning a media campaign More information Contact: Jude Luckett Job title: Programme Officer Organisation: London Sustainability Exchange Phone number: 0207 234 9405 Email address: j.luckett@lsx.org.uk Links: www.lsx.org.uk