So The Lancet believes behaviour change programmes should be abandoned by the Government and replaced by what in their view ‘works’ – a tax and ban approach. Not exactly radical thinking. This, in spite of clear evidences (for example here and here) that tools like choice architecture and social marketing also work.

For an august publication to call for such a retrograde step is an alarming development, and one I’d put down to a lack of appreciation of the true facts… had it not been for other alarm bells that recently clanged at a conference on responsible drinking.

After all, those of us of a certain age will recall that this was a view dominant in the mid noughties. Although academic behaviour change theory was taught to health promotion workers, social marketing as a tool was greeted with scepticism by all but a few pioneers. There were good case studies available even then, but the prevailing view of the public health fraternity usually contained the words: “lack of evidence”, “statistically insignificant” and “not epidemiologically sound”.

I always recall a heated debate in the pub with a former head of health promotion colleague from my days as a Primary Care Trust Head of Comms that “health promotion has nothing to do with marketing, it’s about changing behaviour not selling crisps”. And yet health promotion activity was rarely co-created with the target community. It was too often poorly funded. Qualitative insight was viewed with suspicion. Quantitative research regarded as an expensive luxury. Design agencies might be called upon for posters and leaflets (where there was no in-house capacity), but the capacity and capability of independent practitioner support was not considered. And the programmes rarely had the sustained impact that was desired.

Fortunately, things changed. As an increasing number of practitioners began demonstrating success, the evidence base grew. The National Social Marketing Centre was established by Prof Jeff French – a Non-Executive Director at ICE – and the Department of Health began to fund training, awareness raising and pilot programmes.

Fast forward to 2012, and the international social marketing community has a growing network sharing best practice, and across Europe practitioners regard the UK as a leading example of behaviour change programmes being applied consistently and well. And in spite of recent upheavals in the NHS structure, there remain many, many people in public health committed to delivering improved health outcomes for their local communities, and who advocate all sorts of approaches to changing behaviour – whether a nudge, a hug, a smack or a shove. Fantastic developments, not just for us in the industry but for the clients and ultimately the communities we serve.

Austerity may force us to deliver challenging outcomes for less. But as an industry, we must guard against a return to the scepticism and disillusionment of the past.

Richard Forshaw, Director of Sales & Marketing – richard.forshaw@icecreates.com

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So why does storytelling help engage such diverse groups?

 1.    Stories are social – This is the reason office gossip spreads like wildfire. Research shows that if you want to transmit messages effectively through groups of people, you should make your message social, specifically about people interacting together. This is consistent with the ‘social brain hypothesis’ that human intelligence evolved primarily to deal with social information

 2.    Stories empower both the teller and the listener – In one study, a series of statements were passed through a chain of participants, in a similar way to the children’s game of Chinese Whispers. It was proven that statements with a social content were transmitted more frequently and more accurately. Each telling of a story empowers the next listener to share the information and feed the imagination of yet more people.

3.    Stories create an emotional connection –A story is an emotional experience, which helps us to create visual images we’re likely to remember more readily than straightforward facts. So if you want your influence to last, stories are far more likely to stick in people’s minds.

Working in the heart of communities, we’ve successfully used the natural preference for storytelling to develop campaign designs which lend themselves to word of mouth communications and encourage people to ‘pass along’ key messaging.

We’ve found that storytelling can help highlight a range of issues, including public health, community safety and environmental sustainability. A couple of recent examples include our ‘Conversations with the Community’ in Coventry and our stop smoking work on Salford Legends, where ex-smokers’ experiences were brought to life through their personal stories. We’re also currently working with primary and secondary-school children to develop a ‘story of recycling’ to engage them in more environmentally friendly behaviours.

To discuss how we can help engage your communities and inspire them to act on your messages through compelling storytelling, why not get in touch?

Aaron Garside, Director of Social Change – aaron.garside@icecreates.com  / 0151 647 4700 / 07969 077967 

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It’s reported that the majority of senior-level decision makers questioned believe traditional methods of generating efficiency savings aren’t adequate to meet the demand on public services. However, understanding how citizens’ motivations drive demand could transform relationships with communities, build mutual trust and unlock cost savings.

These findings chime well with ‘SO Change’, an approach which brings together tested principles from the world of social marketing and behaviour change with organisational change techniques such as systems thinking. By intervening simultaneously – changing behaviours inside organisations and in wider communities – organisations can achieve sustainable  change….

SO why?

Simply slashing services could put the most vulnerable at risk, but there is another way.

SO Change is a design-led approach, which starts by listening to people (both internally and in the community).  Organisations establish where they are, explore what’s possible and experiment with options for change. It then helps teams redesign how they work and their communities redesign how they live. Individuals, teams and communities do this themselves, so they own it – and that makes it last.

SO what?

Addressing internal processes and the behaviour of communities in tandem delivers real cash savings. It means people use services more efficiently and organisations can identify wasteful service provision which costs time and money. Ultimately, using a people-centred approach improves people’s lives.

SO when?

Results can be obtained over six weeks, but often, real benefits aren’t seen for six months. Getting started with a programme of transformation now is important for organisations who need to save money and deliver measurable improvements this year and next financial year

SO where?

So Change belongs to organisations and the communities they serve. To find out what your SO Change journey could look like, contact me direct: martin.thomas@icecreates.com /07899 904 237.

Martin Thomas, Director of Organisational Change

It’s a fact that one million working days are lost each year in the UK due to tobacco related conditions, as high levels of ill-health result in absenteeism from work and a shortened working life.

Indeed, a report from the National Social Marketing Centre says that supporting staff’s health and wellbeing could potentially “add significantly to the competitive advantage of UK companies”.  That may explain why programmes like our Workplace Stop Smoking Service – which provides one-to-one and group behavioural support tailored to individual businesses – are proving so popular.

As an NHS funded service, the Stop4Life team uses a proven behaviour change approach in workplace settings across the West Midlands to meet smokers on the own turf and tailor the service for ‘people like us’. Crucially, this also brings tangible benefits for employers – creating a win-win situation through:

• Better health
• Increased productivity
• Improved staff morale
• A pleasant working environment
• A good corporate image.

On a day-to-day basis, the Stop4Life team provides information sessions and advice direct to employees through manned information stands and short talks, including how local people can access Stop4Life services in their community. Where numbers allow, our community intervention workers support employers by offering a workplace Stop4Life service during work time, communicating serious messages in a fresh, accessible and non-judgemental way.

We also provide brief intervention training for key individuals in the workplace – whether that’s health and safety advisers, union reps, occupational health professionals or the HR team – to help new and existing employees in their quit attempts.

By developing people-centred smoking interventions driven by a genuine insight into staff behaviour, we’re seeing that even small businesses can help boost physical and mental wellbeing, improve staff morale and productivity, and help shape more positive attitudes and cultures within the workplace.

In other words, people feel healthier, feel more positive and work better!

Elisabeth Barbosa, Stop4Life Programme Manager – 024 7658 2069 / elisabeth.barbosa@stop4life.co.uk / www.stop4life.co.uk

Website owners now have just a few months to comply with a new law which governs how information can be stored on users’ computers. But with recent research from the Direct Marketing Association revealing that only 21% of UK adults understand how ‘internet cookies’ work, what exactly does this mean for businesses and organisations day-to-day?

Basically, the new regulations say that anyone running a website in the UK needs to get consent from visitors to their website in order to store information – such as internet cookies – on people’s computers.  A key change is that users will have to ‘opt in’ to having cookies placed on their machine, rather than ‘opting out’. Online statistical tools like Google Analytics will also have to comply with the new law.

The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has given site owners a 12 month grace period to get ready for the new law. However, this comes to an end in May 2012 and our digital solutions team has been working with organisations to help clients design and implement these essential changes ahead of the deadline. Here’s a quick rundown of the ICO’s advice:

• Check what type of cookies you use and how you use them: Create an audit of how your website uses cookies, where it uses them and what type of cookies they are. You then need to ask yourself “is this cookie necessary?” You may still have cookies from past versions of the website or from outdated, unused pages. Tidy the website to remove any unused cookies.
• Assess how intrusive your use of cookies is: The purpose of the update to the law is to create more protection for users, so consider how the cookie functions on a scale of neutral to intrusive. Most cookies will be fairly neutral, collecting information on page hits or aesthetic preferences. However, you may have more intrusive cookies that monitor what other websites the user is visiting and provide content accordingly. Obviously, the higher on the intrusive scale, the more appropriate the consent needs to be.
• Decide what solution to obtain consent will be best in your circumstances: Information must be provided for the first time the cookie is set. However, once consent has been gained for this cookie, providing its purpose doesn’t change, you don’t need to gain consent again for that user.

“It’s important to note that changing the terms of use alone to include consent for cookies would not be good enough even if the user had previously consented to the overarching terms. Consent has to be specific and informed.” (ICO)

If all this seems like a daunting task…yes, it is a big challenge for many. However, the ICO recently warned that organisations simply can’t ‘ignore’ the new rules. Remember there’s still time to comply with the new law, but now’s the time to act.

Speak to us now to see how!  Justyn Clark, Head of Digital Media – justyn.clark@icecreates.com / 0845 5193 423 / www.icecreates.com

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It provides a flavour of the work we’re doing to help organisations, communities and individuals transform themselves, and pave the way to deliver growth, innovation and increased demand…..

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1.    Ensure all data is received in a timely manner:  Much effort is expended and much time wasted in payroll offices with staff chasing late information or delaying processes until information is available.  The common culprits are information for overtime and expenses payments.  A whole industry of processes is put in place to deal with them. Far better to look ‘upstream’ to the root causes and remove the causes of delay.  This means working with customers to understand (rather than accuse or blame!) and make it easier to provide timely information to the payroll team.

2.    Receive the right information needed to process payroll: Spending time with clients/customers to make it as easy as possible for them to provide payroll with timely information also allows you to make it easier for them to provide the right information.  This drastically reduces waste and frustration, both for payroll staff and for customers.

3.    Minimise errors: Making it easier for customers to provide the right information to payroll teams means that there are less corrections and amends needed and the risk of errors creeping in is dramatically reduced. One of our clients achieved a significant increase in ‘clean’ data (from around 20% clean to 80% clean) – this also resulted in less errors.

4.    Remove waste, re-work and frustration from processes: Taking time out to work with front line staff and managers to review how the payroll service really works makes visible all of the wastes of rework, delay, hand-off, checking, waiting, correction, and so on.  This exposes the opportunities to improve the internal work designs. The resulting savings from removal of waste are always substantial.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 And the consequences of doing all this in an open, fair and honest way, with clarity of purpose? Staff & managers know how their work delivers what matters to their customers, they work better together and the workplace culture shifts from one of ‘fire-fighting’ and blame to one of supported learning and improvement.  In other words, it adds up to a better place to work.

If you’d like to know more about some of the specific projects we’ve been involved in, and hear more about these best practice approaches, get in touch with: Jaime Beckett (jaime.beckett@icecreates.com / 07764 635472) or Rachel Stamp (rachel.stamp@icecreates.com / 07979 906065.

With recent statistics from Macmillan Cancer showing survival times for some cancers are still counted in weeks rather than years, there’s no doubt tackling the prevalence of cancer in our communities is still a major concern.

Having worked with numerous NHS Trusts using a ‘push and pull’ strategy to get both internal and external partners engaged in cancer interventions which really resonate with target groups, here are our five keys steps to driving positive behaviour change in this challenging area….

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1. ‘Push’ bespoke interventions – Work with stakeholders to develop insight-led interventions which meet local communities at a time and place that suits them. This will enable you to engage people at their greatest point of need and ‘push’ them to make appointments sooner, thus enabling earlier diagnoses and getting higher footfall into secondary care services.

2. ‘Pull’ stakeholders into the process – Getting sustainable buy-in from all partners is essential to driving people to see their GP and signposting them to secondary care. It’s all too easy to lose focus on stakeholder communications, but if they don’t sign up to your objectives, hitting your KPIs will be an uphill battle. To keep up the momentum, keep them involved at every stage.

3. Make health professionals integral to the intervention – As well as their clinical expertise, health professionals are essential community ‘connectors’. For example, pharmacists have a vital role in the engagement – talking to people about the signs and symptoms of cancer and referring patients to their GP.

4.  Use demographic profiling – By harnessing demographic profiling in partnership with your stakeholders, you’ll focus on the areas of highest prevalence and develop key interventions in cancer ‘hotspots’. For instance, our targeted work on lung cancer in the South West has seen us working in key deprived communities with high smoking and drinking levels.

5. Put evaluation at the heart of the process – Think carefully about how you need to evaluate your work and be prepared to adapt your approach, in conjunction with stakeholders, to achieve the outcomes you need. The ‘push’ aspect might include the number of people engaged and signposted into services, while the ‘pull’ element may be around the number of people attending GP appointments, referred into x-rays and the outcome of this.

If you’d like to know more about replicating this proven approach and making it work for you, contact  our Director of Social Change, Aaron Garside on 0845 5193 423 or aaron.garside@icecreates.com

80% of people online can be reached through social media.

We’re seeing a steady increase in interest from our clients too.  But while many people want to ‘do something with social media’, they often aren’t aware of how it fits in with their existing communications – or don’t realise its full potential for gathering insight and driving forward changes in perceptions, attitudes and behaviours.

So here are our top five tips to making  social media channels work for you:

1. Use the channels your audiences use – Where are your audiences talking to each other and other organisations like you?  Maybe they use social networking sites, microblogging, video, wikis? However your communities communicate online, you need to be there too. Consider how they behave and how you want their relationships with you to change.

2. Listen to conversations on social media – Not only can you gather valuable audience insight, but you’ll get a feel for the tone and type of conversation that’s happening, so you know the etiquette when you do decide to join in. Start small and continue to experiment, test and review.

3. How does your audience use online information? Is it at a computer or through a smartphone?  This opens up lots of possibilities to create exciting apps that engage your audience in new and innovative ways.  For example, we’ve created a ‘blockbuster’ mobile phone game to engage young people on health issues, automated SMS and geo-apps that log where and how far people have walked as part of health initiatives. We’re also creating websites which spread behaviour change messages virally through social networking sites.

4. Consider social media as an evolution of what you’re already doing and provide valuable content - Examine how you can practically include social media in your communications mix and day to day activities.  We’re currently working with numerous NHS Trusts to integrate social media with PR and behaviour change messaging to drive really cost-effective interventions.

5. Use social media monitoring tools – Social media isn’t just about new technology which facilitates relationships, it’s an essential tool to shape services and savings across your organisation. By tapping into bespoke monitoring tools, you can tap into a wide array of metrics to help determine campaign effectiveness, message saturation and channel performance.

Download a pdf version of this blog here

To find out more about the power and potential of social media, why not get in touch:  Richard Forshaw, richard.forshaw@icecreates.com / 07540 412304.

Working with organisations right across the spectrum in co-creating ways to identify, connect with and engage, and ultimately move audiences with communications and experiences – it’s increasingly clear that what clients and end-users alike value above all else is truth. Truth about a brand’s values, truth about a user experience, truth about the world we live and operate in.

Increasingly in the world of marketing and communications, this truth is being referred to as authenticity. Primarily a term coined in this context by Gilmore and Pine in their business blockbuster “Authenticity: What Customers Want”, this refers to embracing the range of truths about an organisation’s people, expertise, brand, offers, and above all values, that really make them what and who they are.

The theory goes that through embracing authenticity, organisations, brands, and movements will inspire people as a result of projecting the reality of who they are, rather than whom they’d like to be perceived as. This, so the theory (and increasingly the reality to be fair) goes, will result in loyal customers and ever increasing growth.

It’s what I – and many others of my age who grew up listening to music in the 1990s – would refer to as “keeping it real” (a term never more brilliantly challenged, embraced and illustrated than here.)

At ICE, we feel very fortunate to be working and partnering with organisations that share our values of innovation, empowerment, and change. It feels great to be able to be true to ourselves and incredibly heartening to work with others increasingly doing the same.

But “the truth” can be more complicated than you first might think. It is, as many philosophers will attest, an inherently subjective concept. Each individual has his or her own truth, each organisation their own, and each brand its own. The key is to encapsulate and articulate it in such a way that makes it real and meaningful to those with whom they have a relationship: namely friends and loved ones, clients, and ultimately customers.

But in complicated times, and with many conflicting priorities, it can be challenging for organisations to look within themselves as a whole, and towards themselves from outside – to really drill down to the values and drivers that make them get out of bed in the morning, excite them in their work, deliver great value to partners and customers, and set them apart from the noise in their particular marketplaces.

This is where we at ICE are making massive strides in helping our clients to articulate what makes them who they are. Through co-creating visions and solutions with teams and customers, we’re increasingly challenging old thinking and perceived conventional wisdom to create communications and solutions that really encapsulate values and engage with customers and end-users (i.e. people!).

From simple brand identity, to web development to the creation of full end-to-end marketing and communications strategies, we know that communications work best when they originate from a trusted source. The best way to be trusted is to be truthful, or where that’s too difficult a concept to grasp, at least to be “real”.

Call it authenticity, call it truth, call it keeping it real – the crux of the matter is, if you don’t know yourself, neither will the people you’re looking to engage with.

We don’t tell tall tales or make up stories about our clients. We empower them to speak their own truth, as people, to other people through innovation, passion, and vision.

That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning. That’s our truth.

Ben Capper – Principal Marketing Practitioner

ben.capper@icecreates.com

@bencapper