Melbourne’s Southern Metropolitan Region social media campaign ‘Feed Happiness’ promoted healthy eating to support good mental health. Evaluation findings demonstrate that it was effective in reaching the target audience and influencing community behaviour.
Feed Happiness was an innovative social media campaign undertaken by nineteen organisations in Melbourne’s Southern Metropolitan Region in February-March 2021. In a region-first approach, and in response to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown of Greater Melbourne in 2020, the campaign focused on the promotion of healthy eating to support good mental health. Feed Happiness involved collaboration between all partner organisations to develop and promote campaign messaging and was supported by capacity building workshops from marketing professionals. The campaign was delivered via Facebook and Instagram over four weeks.
Values-based messaging was used to encourage more people to choose healthier food options within the places that they live, learn, work and play, to support good mental health and wellbeing. The four aims of the campaign were to:
- increase understanding of food and its link to mental health and wellbeing
- identify specific foods that can support better mental health (to make healthier options easier)
- find and build motivation for people to prepare and eat healthy foods that can support better mental health (to make healthier options easier)
- generate social sharing and community interest to boost awareness through peer-to-peer influence.
Feed Happiness targeted families, parents and carers of young children 0-15 year’s old, and young people 16-25 years old. These demographics were selected based upon the mental health and nutrition needs, and vulnerabilities of families and young people within the Southern Metropolitan region during lockdowns and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both demographics, the campaign specifically focused on those with low awareness and /or understanding of the links between healthy eating and psychological benefits.
Rob Macindoe, Executive Director at Enliven Victoria, commends the partnership between the organisations saying, “enliven was excited to be a key partner of the “Feed Happiness” initiative, a ground breaking approach to promote good mental health and healthy eating. Partnering with 18 other participating organisations, the use of social media to drive healthy behaviours and influence change was an exciting innovation that both met the challenges of working within the constraints of the COVID pandemic as well as optimising the use of social media as a contemporary approach to effective messaging”.
Cassandra Crothers-Swensson, Health Promotion Practitioner at Monash Health and Steering Group member says, “It was exciting to be part of this innovative project. It was a key time to be building community understanding of the link between healthy eating and good mental health, and by combining our expertise, resources and funding across 19 organisations we reached far more people with one unified message. What we learned about campaigning as a partnership group will be very useful for our individual and collective prevention work in the future”.
You can read more about the evaluation results of the Feed Happiness campaign here.
Let's Feed Happiness with food that is good for our brain. Head to our webpage to read more about Feed Happiness evaluation results, or check out our Facebook page and Instagram to keep up to date with future campaigns.