Business Challenge: The goal of the "Champions for Change" outreach campaign, federally funded via the Food Stamp program, was to increase healthy eating habits among low-income households, since there seems to be an inverse correlation between income level and level of healthy eating. Marketing targets requirement was households in 185%+ poverty level census tracts in California.

Solution: handshake provided behavioral target definitions, target profiles, campaign input, direct mail lists, performance measurement, and optimization services. The client used grassroots, mass media, and direct mail tactics to motivate households to improve their eating habits. The DM package included healthy eating tips and recipes from real Moms to real Moms, a DVD with healthy eating information, and business reply cards; most materials were bilingual English and Spanish.

Results:

Though it was less than 10% of the total campaign spend, total direct-to-home represented 98% of total campaign responses (over 10,000 mail response cards received).
Field research showed a measurable lift in recipients'Direct mail field research results: "self efficacy and normative beliefs" (i.e., change in attitudes) and some lift in "response efficacy". It's very rare to achieve this kind of lift from one campaign tactic.
Markets with higher presence of outreach centers performed better than markets with no centers.

Learning: While mass media has value in cause campaigns, it can be cost-inefficient to reach micro targets with mass media. Targeted direct-to-home was proven to not only be the most cost-efficient tactic, but was the only tactic to result in measurable behavioral change.

Case Study: Ground-breaking effort results in social/behavioral change