We’ve had a lot of success in Durham County Council this year signing our staff up to Dry January®. Why was the campaign so successful? Well, it could be our planning, or our enthusiasm, or our committed and informed staff. Let me share with you what we’ve done to try to figure out what made the campaign work so well.
As a council we have always supported the Dry January® campaign, however this year we aligned our activity with better health at work. This meant that myself and Jane, our Better Health at Work Project Officer, became a double act encouraging our staff to sign up and participate in Dry January®. We also worked closely with Lynsey in our Corporate Comms team, making sure we got as much out of our external and internal communication as we could.
Meeting up with Jane and Lynsey we agreed two main aims: develop a process to sign up as many people as we could (we’re not competitive at all) and have as many meaningful discussions about alcohol as possible. We know not everyone will sign up, but the campaign still provides an opportunity to start a conversation about personal alcohol consumption and health-related harm.
One of our main ideas was to hold sign up events every day of the Dry January® launch week in December across eight of our office and depot sites. Our strategy was engaging with people at the staff entrance in the morning and using the entrance to the canteen at lunchtime. These are the two highest footfall areas in most buildings.
Mornings worked better than lunchtimes at every site. I’ve learnt never to get in the way of people in need of food.
The other major thing we planned, and it really worked in our favour, was to create a basic sign-up sheet (name, email, postcode and consent) for people to fill in at our events - we registered them online later ourselves, and it’s not as time consuming as you may think.
We gave out Dry January® leaflets along with an alcohol guidelines information sheet to everyone. Even the ones who said no, we gave them the handout, giving us the opportunity to engage.