No Smokes

Public

No Smokes aims to educate young Indigenous people about the dangers of smoking and assist them to quit. It aims to do this with a youth and Indigenous friendly website featuring interactive games, animations, videos, quizzes and health information to provide support to smokers to get quit and stay quit.

Organisation or Department

Menzies School of Health Research

State

Nationwide

Project Timeframe

The No Smokes website will be live in early 2012. In the interim however, there is a No Smokes YouTube channel and Facebook page, and snippets from the site are featured on these.

Project Activities

The primary activity for this project is the building of the No Smokes website and creation of its Indigenous specific and youth friendly tools and information.

The website will feature five key sections, namely:

The facts - about Indigenous smoking and its history
Your health - the impact of smoking on health, how addiction works, the cost of smoking, passive smoking
Quitting - the benefits of quitting for your health and information on ways to quit, links to other anti-smoking information
Stories - videos of Indigenous role models, celebrities, elders and health workers delivering anti-smoking messages. Site users may upload their own stories.
Fun - with interactive games, music, quizzes, ringtones, videos, etc.

The website also has a section for teachers and health workers, with resources including curriculum materials, downloadable facts sheets and interactive activities for students.

As well as customised textual information and links to existing resources, No Smokes is developing a range of new 'products'.

Products include:

a smoking calculator
an animation about addiction
an animation detailing the facts about smoking
an interactive games show style quiz the completion of which creates a customised quit plan
a hip hop 'dance off' featuring innovative jib jab technology to allow users to superimpose their head on one of the dancers (either the smoker or non-smoker, as appropriate) as they compete
comedy skits by Indigenous comedian Sean Choolburra
numerous videos with known and respected Aboriginal people

All products developed as part of No Smokes are Indigenous specific. The site itself and many of its tools are red, yellow and black (illiciting much positive feedback at focus testing). Illustrations have been created by Indigenous artists and Aboriginal faces feature prominently. The characters in animations are identifiably Aboriginal.

No Smokes delivers - in a fun, interactive way - powerful anti-smoking messages which have already been validated as resonating with young Aboriginal people.

Design development of the website is now complete and its build is underway via an external digital communications agency. Many of the No Smokes products have been completed and development of the remaining content is currently taking place.

Partner Organisations

No Smokes is an independent project under the auspices of Menzies School of Health Research. While it takes in the contributions of a wide range of Indigenous organisations and individuals, its only formal partnership is with its funding body, DOHA.

There is a new partnership in development with the NPY Women's Council in Alice Springs, centred around the dangers of passive smoking. The Women's Council is interested in pursuing this interest area following on from successful similar work on foetal alcohol syndrome.

What in particular helped the project?

The generous advice and participation of Aboriginal people has assisted the project immeasurably. No Smokes has benefitted from the wisdom and experiences of organisations and individuals across Victoria and the Northern Territory. No Smokes has also enjoyed the co-operation of mainstream anti-smoking agencies such as QuitVic and VicHealth. No Smokes staff has also been instrumental. Project leader Dr Sheree Cairney has significant experience designing social marketing devices and communications tools specifically for use by Indigenous people, especially in remote communities. Two staff members are experienced multimedia experts, video producers and editors, one is an evaluator with broad experience in the Indigenous domain and one is a communications professional with a background in social marketing.

No Smokes has at every turn pursued a policy of focus testing ideas with Indigenous young people and the intermediaries who represent them. It consults regularly with Indigenous advisors and NT elders to ensure its cultural appropriateness.

What in particular didn't work so well?

The team's commitment to consultation and focus testing has slowed the project down considerably, as getting groups together and getting hold of people often proves time consuming. Getting quotes from external providers has also proved problematic on occasions. The lack of high level technical skills with regard to website builds has meant that often we've been flying blind with regard to what costs are reasonable. Similarly, negotiating legal agreements with various contributors has been a learning curve. Intellectual property and copyright laws are complex and fraught with potential misunderstandings and ownership disagreements. This has also been time consuming and at times costly.

Summary of Findings and Recommendations

None as yet

Project Evaluation

Given the scarcity of Indigenous specific anti-smoking campaigns (or for that matter, Indigenous specific social marketing) and innovative nature of much of the No Smokes material, rigorous evaluation is a crucial project component.

Evaluation has been built into both the formative component of the project, to inform its overall design and the direction of each of its component parts. Formative evaluation has explored young Aboriginal people's knowledge of and attitudes towards tobacco and quitting, the degree to which they use the internet, social media and mobile phones, their favourite Indigenous celebrities, their motivators for multimedia usage and reactions to No Smokes multimedia features and sample anti-tobacco advertisements. Methods in this regard have included focus groups with young people and intermediaries and supplementary interviews with key informants.

Summative evaluation - to determine how many people are using and returning to the site, which information/products are most popular, to what extent is the target audience being reached and has the website lead to knowledge and behavioural change - is currently being built into the website design.
Mechanisms for summative evaluation include Google analytics (number of site visitors, page visits, location of users, etc.), online polls and surveys on the site (with prizes as incentives for users to fill them in) and demographic questions in the So You Think You Can Quit quiz and Smoking Calculator.

Evaluation of the project's processes is also taking place.

Project Resources and Publications

No Smokes in the process of developing/has developed:

an animation on how addiction works
an animation that explains the facts about smoking
a game show style quiz entitled 'So You Think You Can Quit' which provides a customised quit plan for respondents
an interactive hip hop dance off game using 'jib jab' technology whereby users may superimpose their own head on one of the dancers, either a smoker or a non-smoker
a smoking calculator which works out how addicted respondents are, how much they spend on cigarettes, what else that money might buy, etc.
numerous video interviews with Aboriginal celebrities and sports stars, elders, health workers, quitters, etc.
pdf facts sheets on a wide range of smoking related issues
downloadable resources for health workers and teachers

Some of these resources are complete and available on DVD but many are still in development.

All project resources will be available electronically once the No Smokes website is live, in early 2012. In the interim, some videos have been uploaded onto http://www.youtube.com/user/nosmokestv?feature=mhee. No Smokes has a Facebook profile entitled 'No Smokes'. This also features snippets of completed products.