12/14/2021

4 Ways to Educate Through Health Awareness Events

Steven Franklin, Product Marketing Manager

Health awareness events draw attention to conditions and diagnoses that might otherwise go unnoticed. The events can be specific days, weeks, or months used to recognize health conditions that affect tens of thousands to millions around the globe. Some of the most familiar are Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October), World Diabetes Day (November 14), and World AIDS Day (December 1). By spotlighting specific health conditions, we can educate and empower everyone to live their healthiest lives.

Your organization can provide a valuable community resource by promoting these days on your website and social media feeds.

Here are four tips for successful health awareness campaigns:

1. Create a calendar and stick to it.

There are well over 200 healthcare-based awareness days, weeks, and months currently recognized. Creating posts and articles for each event is neither realistic or necessary to run successful campaigns. In fact, content overload can create digital clutter that distracts from the very thing you’re trying to accomplish—effective education and outreach to your community.

To avoid content overload, choose a few of these events to focus on during the year. Your organization will likely want to target certain content areas based on service lines you offer, popular national health issues, or specific health issues that are affecting your community.

There's no magic number for how many health awareness events you might like to promote. Stick to a number you can commit to based on the resources you have available.

2. Provide educational resources.

Bringing attention to specific conditions is a great start. To be most effective, reinforce that attention with specific education that's targeted to empower your community to act. At minimum, awareness outreach content should include:

• A description of the disease or condition.
• Why it is important. Use statistics about the number of people affected, outcomes, and costs.
• What to look for (signs and symptoms).

By including all three of the areas above, your readers understand the condition better and are prepared to recognize the condition in themselves or others.

3. Provide next steps.

Once your readers are aware and educated about the issue, it's always best practice to provide next steps for action. Action steps may vary quite a bit depending on the issue, but consider providing:

• Contact information to schedule.
  Readers who are educated about a condition might need to take the next step and get evaluated or screened. Make it easy for your readers to take action by providing links to schedule an appointment or to speak to a specialist.
• More education.
  Some readers will want to learn more about a topic or condition before acting. Consider providing additional in-depth resources to further their understanding. This might be from resources on your website or external resources from a trusted source. Trusted sources include government agencies, peer-reviewed research, or other respected medical organizations.
• Emotional support resources.
  Links to hotlines, support groups, and counseling services can be especially helpful to guide readers who might be struggling with the emotional side of a health topic. Provide resources to community events, counselors that specialize in the subject, or support groups based on the health condition.

4. Engage the reader.

Creating engaging content is not as difficult as it may sound, but it’s essential to be effective. Each person learns and absorbs information in a different way, and a mix of various types of content will get the best results. Try to include at least two or more of the following in your articles or posts:

• Text that is short, simple, and to the point
• Images that connect with the reader
• Videos
• Infographics or simple charts

In short, health awareness events are perfect touchpoints for bringing education and awareness to a variety of health topics. You can provide valuable community education by publicizing awareness events and providing resources to improve patient education.

Healthwise provides services that are specifically designed to craft effective marketing outreach on a wide variety of health topics. This includes award-winning structured multimedia content that can be easily integrated into campaigns of any size and media. For more information on leveraging Healthwise content in your campaigns, please contact us.