Department of Health and Social Care and Paragon DCX

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.

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.