A health campaign is a type of media campaign which attempts to promote public health by making new health interventions available. The organizers of a health campaign frequently use education along with an opportunity to participate further, such as when a vaccination campaign seeks both to educate the public about a vaccine and provide the vaccine to people who want it. When a health campaign has international relevance it may be called a global health campaign.
Examples
Health education
Many diseases and medical problems have a "health education campaign" or "awareness campaign" associated with them. The goal of such a campaign is to make people conscious of the impact of diseases and to provide them information about the disease if they want to learn more about it.
Eradication of infectious diseases
Various health campaigns have taken the goal of eradicating infectious diseases. In such campaigns the organizers recruit the public to participate in the campaign by talking about it with others and encouraging others to participate.
Behavior modification campaign
An organization may create a campaign which asks for participants to change their behavior in some way. Examples of such projects are smoking cessation campaigns which ask people to quit smoking, HIV prevention campaigns which ask people to do things such as use condoms to reduce HIV infection risk, or exercise campaigns which encourage people to engage in physical activity for health.
Organizations as campaigns
In some cases the work of an organization may itself be a health campaign. This may happen when, for example, an organization exists to provide health information or medical resources to anyone who requests them. The organization itself may conduct a series of health campaigns, and its entire operation may be called a health campaign.
Health Campaign Design: ACME Framework
The Audience-Channel-Message-Evaluation (ACME) framework provides integrated guidance for effective health communication campaign design, implementation, and evaluation. The ACME framework suggests four principles to follow when developing a health communication campaign: 1) audience segmentation, 2) channel selection, 3) theory-based message design, and 4) outcome evaluation. The four principles are interconnected in guiding every decision point over the course of health campaign development. For instance, audience segmentation implies channel selection, message design, and evaluation plans. Message design additionally determines channel selection and vice versa. Evaluation is carried out through the whole campaign development and implementation rather than a one-time, separate assessment.
Audience (who?) The first principle to consider when developing an effective campaign is to identify the target audience. The procedure is also known as audience segmentation, which refers to a step narrowing down a homogenous audience to a heterogenous audience that shares similar patterns of beliefs, behaviors, and values. Segmentation strategies could be as broad as focusing on demographic or geographic characteristics such as gender and location. Yet it could also be as specific as dividing groups based on shared attitudes toward a given object (e.g., positive attitudes toward a promoted health behavior) or similar behaviors (e.g., performing healthy eating behaviors).