Halton & St Helens Primary Care Trust | Hard-Hitting Sexual Health Campaign
June 24th, 2009
A light-hearted but hard-hitting campaign by Halton and St Helens Primary Care Trust – conceived and created by Engage Group’s Manchester team – seeks to persuade more 20-25 year-olds to use condoms.
Research by Engage Group among more than 300 young men and women in Halton and St Helens, where teenage pregnancies and STIs are more common than the national average, showed that the perceived risk from STIs is low and outweighed by the ‘cons’ of using a condom, including expense, discomfort, and embarrassment.
The Engage team responded by creating a cheeky but informative campaign, headlined ‘Stick one on before you get stuck in!’
“We discovered that 20-25 year-olds aren’t really scared by ‘silent’ infections or STIs with long-term effects,” says partner Brook Calverley, “so we created a campaign that brings STIs into the ‘here and now’ for young people, by focusing on more immediate symptoms.”
The campaign uses washroom posters delivering information about individual STIs, ‘peanut boards’, table talkers’ and unpleasantly pungent ‘scratch-and-sniff’ cards, all designed for maximum visibility and impact. It is supported by outreach teams, who were touring local bars and pubs earlier this month handing out condoms and sexual advice and will be back on the streets in mid-July.
What do you think?