Celebrating Middlesbrough's Healthy Town Programme: making a national brand relevant to residents and keeping them informed about exciting local developments and projects.

The Approach

The Middlesbrough Healthy Town Programme involves more than 20 partners. Initial research centred on those organisations, using a combination of project funding documents, stakeholder meetings and telephone interviews to gain a full understanding of the work of key agencies involved.

The Programme included four key themes: Get Active; Grow Your Own; Enjoy The Outdoors; and Be A Young Health Champion. We defined the key audiences for each to ensure we used the right messages and marketing approaches to get the attention of the members of the public being targeted.

The brand we developed is based on the national Change4Life campaign and draws in key Middlesbrough landmarks, a suite of characters and messages - all designed to appeal to the local audience.

The communications campaign included an initial awareness push using outdoor advertising, posters for all key venues, an animated commercial broadcast in the town centre and in GP surgeries, a microsite, monthly ebulletin and direct mail.

The campaign promoted initiatives including the Middlesbrough Town Meal, which showcased locally grown produce, free allotment plots, walk to school pilots and free bicycles for schoolchildren.

The Results

Since the programme was launched more than 75 projects have started across the town, ranging from community and urban gardens to new cycling route and events, play areas and community grants.

The measure of the success of the marketing campaign was in the level of engagement in the projects, and the people of Middlesbrough have clearly voted with their feet.

The Middlesbrough Town Meal event attracted more than 10,000 people to the town's Centre Square to sample food cooked using produce grown by local people in their gardens, allotments and by schools and community groups.

More than 1,000 children have signed up for the Incentivised Bike Scheme, which offered participants a new bike and HiVis backpack complete with a helmet, lock, lights and puncture repair kit. Hundreds of schoolchildren from primary and secondary schools have ditched the parental lift after joining the Walk To School initiative.

And more than 30 schools and community groups are now growing their own fruit and vegetables after signing up to the Community Growing project.