Move Your Way® is the promotional campaign for the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Over the past 3 years, ODPHP has worked with communities across the country to implement the campaign. From 2019 to 2021, community organizations worked with partners to host activities, distribute materials, and promote the campaign on social media. Using the experiences and lessons learned from these community pilots, ODPHP developed the Move Your Way Community Playbook to help organizations implement the campaign at the local level. Community organizations — like health departments and nonprofits — can use the playbook to promote physical activity in their communities.
Now that the pilot phase has concluded, ODPHP continues to improve the Move Your Way Community Playbook and develop additional resources for community organizations that want to implement the campaign on their own. This blog post highlights the efforts of Austin Public Health (APH), a local health department that used Move Your Way to launch a social media and digital ad campaign to highlight physical activity resources in its community.
Based in Austin, Texas, APH “works to ensure that the community is protected from disease and other public health threats, and to empower others to live healthier, safe lives.” One way APH aimed to do this was through the Active Living campaign, which included digital ads in English and Spanish that promoted places in Austin to get active. The APH team then reached out to ODPHP to learn how it could use Move Your Way in the campaign.
As part of the Active Living campaign, APH customized Move Your Way materials. It also developed ads that featured images reflecting its diverse community and linked out to community resources. Clicking the ads directed people to the Get Active page on APH’s Healthy Places, Healthy People website — which provides information on the health benefits of physical activity and programs to help people stay motivated to get active. The site also includes a list of parks, recreation centers, and local trails where community members can be active.
“We wanted to launch a campaign focused on physical activity resources — indoor and outdoor — in the community because 1 in 5 Travis County residents are not participating in leisure-time physical activity,” says Ashley LeMaistre, Program Coordinator for APH. “When we discovered the Move Your Way campaign, we thought the message and materials fit perfectly for our ads. They highlighted different ways to move and emphasized that all sorts of activities count as physical activity — a message we think is important.”
APH found its Active Living campaign to be a great success. The digital English and Spanish ads featured across different websites garnered over 160,000 impressions (the number of times the ads were displayed on a screen). And on social media, APH’s Facebook and Instagram ads generated more than 170,000 impressions. APH plans to run the campaign again in late February 2023.
Want to successfully implement Move Your Way in your community? Check out a variety of helpful resources on our Move Your Way Community Resources page.
ODPHP is here to help! Reach out to us with any questions about implementing Move Your Way in your community.
