On 2 March we were joined in a webinar by Rachel Harris and Sheena Fletcher from Glasgow Centre for Population Health. As with previous #ScotPublicHealth #PublicHealthHour sessions this gave us an opportunity to talk about a Public Health topic while also learning techniques in social media and wider engagement. In this session we learnt about assets-based approaches to health and some social media techniques including use of infographics.

Rachel, GCPH researcher, told us about her work with Scottish Community Development Centre on Animating Assets (full report). Rachel’s slides are available as a Slideshare.

Josie Murray, tweeting during the session captured some of the key points about assets based approaches from Rachel’s session:

• a move from a focus on needs to a focus on strengths
• allows meaningful engagement (eg with young people)

The approach and purpose of the Animating Assets work differed between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The full report explains this and other details, including a series of case studies, and is well worth a read.

Sheena, GCPH E-Comms Officer, then took us through a Prezi on GCPH’s approach to online engagement. Check out  the previous blog for  examples of GCPH infographics.

GCPH has developed an effective and multi-platform approach to engaging with their staff, partners and wider audience (eg Twitter, Facebook, blog, website, YouTube and Storify). Infographics have been an important part of this engagement and play an important role in the centre’s dissemination of research findings. Simple tips on use of images, hashtags and links can have a major impact on the success of a tweet.

There are major benefits from the multi-stranded approach described by Sheena:

• Blogs and infographics  add “lighter” content to provide a balance to data-heavy research
• Guest blogs provide diversity
• Collaboration means that contributors play to their strengths – eg social media experts + researchers who know their data –> greater impact
• Animation can draw in a much wider audience (eg this resilience film from GCPH)
• Infographics don’t need to be expensive (eg free version of Piktochart fine for most purposes)

During the session we asked participants in the #PublicHealthHour to tweet examples of infographics. There are some great examples from other organisations in this Storify, with some highlights below.

Thank you again to Rachel, Sheena, #publichealthhour participants and everybody who helped promote the session. Over the 24 hour period around the session #ScotPublicHealth achieved over quarter of a million impressions, with 155 tweets/ retweets and 60 participants. (Tweets = tweets and retweets; mentions = tweets and retweets mentioning the named person; data from Symplur).

There is no #publichealthhour session in April (because of the Easter holiday). The next #publichealthhour sessions are:

• Dr. Cath Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer (POSTPONED due to Scottish election)
• Dr. Andrew Fraser from NHS Health Scotland and Dr. Angela Donkin from Institute of Health Equity talking about inequalities on 1 June 2016, 12.30-1.30 (find out more and register)

Graham Mackenzie 31.3.16 

@gmacscotland on Twitter