The NSMC is currently researching the issue of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the East of England.
We are delighted that the client has chosen a social marketing approach to understanding and tackling this challenge as a traditional 'expert-led' approach is unlikely to be successful.
The NMSC is part of the consortium delivering the 'Read Your Way' project which is working to improve literacy amongst young people in Hastings.
We are pleased to see that our partner organisation in Jordan, the JSMC has recently completed a water saving campaign that reached over 57 million people across the Middle East and has increased knowledge of the water crisis in Jordan by 20%.
Over the last 12 months, the NSMC has been working with the Hastings Opportunity Area (HOA) carrying out research with young people, parents and schools to tackle Hastings long standing issues around attendance.
The NSMC has just completed a primary research project to identify the reasons why people go to A&E rather than other urgent care services that may be more appropriate to their needs. The research is very revealing with many people stating that they judge the waiting time of often over three hours at A&E more favourable than other healthcare alternatives, especially when they believed they would need some form of diagnostic test that would take place in a hospital.
The NSMC has just finished training the Communications Department of Miyahuna Water company to deliver new household social marketing campaigns over the summer period in Amman, Jordan. One of the campaigns is aimed at reducing the shower times of young people from 10 minutes to 5 minutes - a particularly hard challenge! The other two campaigns are aimed at getting households to report faults and conserve water in the kitchen. The campaigns will be further developed over the next weeks and we will let you know of how they develop.
The NSMC will be working with the King Hussein Foundation in Jordan over the next 12 months to develop three community renewable energy programmes. Currently Jordan has to import 97% of its energy so there is a real effort going on by all actors in the sector to increase the size of the renewable energy sector. The communities in Beni Kanana, Tafilaha and Amman will receive social marketing and advocacy training which will enable them to develop their own community projects. Funding is being provided by the European Union to implement these new initiatives.
We have just completed a "Train to Deliver" social marketing course for the Jordanian Royal Rangers in Amman. The Royal Rangers are responsible for protecting Jordan's natural environment and resources. We have been working with them specifically to develop behaviour change programmes to stop pollution and the theft of Jordan's precious water supplies.
The NSMC has been very fortunate over recent years to island hop and work on various different islands around the world, including the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, and now St Helena. With the drive for place-based approaches to health, local authorities and Clinical Commissioning Groups could learn a lot from the approach taken by these islands, particularly St Helena and their natural total place approaches.
The NSMC is now working with the Jordan Social Marketing Center and Tetratech on a USAID funded project to improve water efficiency in households, industry and the service sector in Jordan. Jordan is a "water poor" country that rations water to nearly all of its population. Most households are supplied with water once a week this is then stored in water in tanks often on the roof.
'You want to stop young people from volunteering in overseas orphanages, shouldn't it be the other way round?' This is the usual response I get when I tell people about one of our latest projects.
We are delighted to announce that the NSMC will be running its Three-day Introduction to Social Marketing training course in Washington D.C. in May 2018. We have run this course for a couple of years exclusively for a client in Washington but this year we are opening it up to everyone.
