Engaging Minority Youth in Diabetes Prevention Efforts Through a Participatory, Spoken-Word Social Marketing Campaign.

Purpose: To examine the reach, efficacy, and adoption of The Bigger Picture, a type 2 diabetes (T2DM) social marketing campaign that uses spoken-word public service announcements (PSAs) to teach youth about socioenvironmental conditions influencing T2DM risk.

Design: A nonexperimental pilot dissemination evaluation through high school assemblies and a Web-based platform were used.

Setting: The study took place in San Francisco Bay Area high schools during 2013.

Subjects: In the study, 885 students were sampled from 13 high schools.

Intervention: A 1-hour assembly provided data, poet performances, video PSAs, and Web-based platform information. A Web-based platform featured the campaign Web site and social media.

Measures: Student surveys preassembly and postassembly (knowledge, attitudes), assembly observations, school demographics, counts of Web-based utilization, and adoption were measured.

Analysis: Descriptive statistics, McNemar's χ test, and mixed modeling accounting for clustering were used to analyze data.

Results: The campaign included 23 youth poet-created PSAs. It reached >2400 students (93% self-identified non-white) through school assemblies and has garnered >1,000,000 views of Web-based video PSAs. School participants demonstrated increased short-term knowledge of T2DM as preventable, with risk driven by socioenvironmental factors (34% preassembly identified environmental causes as influencing T2DM risk compared to 83% postassembly), and perceived greater personal salience of T2DM risk reduction (p < .001 for all). The campaign has been adopted by regional public health departments.

Conclusion: The Bigger Picture campaign showed its potential for reaching and engaging diverse youth. Campaign messaging is being adopted by stakeholders.