Building and Maintaining a Whole Community Initiative: Health Communication in Practice with Be Well Communities™.

The most effective health communication builds from evidence-based best practices and theory. In practice, health campaigns rely on considerations often under-discussed in health communication, such as consistent agency-style client service, image management, and community coalition-building. Health outcome progress often requires change at multiple levels, from individual cognition and behavior to policy creation. These multi-level needs further highlight the importance of effective practical health communication supporting a range of outcomes and building toward replication. This article covers the complexities of building and implementing a theory-informed health communication structure for a multifaceted, place-based cancer prevention initiative. Part of the overall process includes detailing the internal communications of a health communication group, interorganizational communication, engaging community partner support, the message creation process, and longitudinal efforts on program maintenance and assessment. Furthermore, this article seeks to offer an example of the client service role a health communication team can play to combine theory, empirical message development, and community goals in whole community efforts. Ultimately, the goal is to share experiences from seven years of program work to help guide future community-based efforts in other health contexts and foster progress in theoretical and practical understandings of health communication.

Implementation and Evaluation of a Multi-level, Place-Based Tobacco Prevention and Control Program at a Minority-Serving Institution in Texas.

Multi-level, place-based interventions have proven effective at promoting a range of health behaviors, including tobacco control and discouraging the uptake of tobacco products. This paper describes the implementation and impact of a 3-year, multi-level tobacco prevention and control program at a community-college minority-serving institution (MSI) on the Texas Gulf Coast within the context of a broader multi-sector, cross-functional health coalition. The intervention studied included a tobacco-free policy, a large-scale communication campaign highlighting parts of the intervention and prevention and cessation resources. The intervention was bolstered by the support of a community-led Steering Committee and tobacco control experts. Results from the first 3 years of implementation show that tobacco-free policies were largely supported by community members, awareness of the policy increased over time, and tobacco prevention and cessation resources were successfully embedded into campus norms. This multi-component approach shows how a community college was able to effectively reach students and staff on their campus to increase awareness of both the campus tobacco-free policy and the availability of tobacco prevention and cessation resources. Additionally, it also offers lessons for future tobacco prevention and control work in higher education.

Countering online marketing and user endorsements with enhanced cannabis warning labels: An online experiment among at-risk youth and young adults.

As cannabis legalization expands and online marketing intensifies, this study examines whether online social cues can amplify youth-targeted cannabis advertising and whether cannabis warning labels (CWLs) can counteract these influences. A U.S. online sample of 970 adolescents and 1776 young adults susceptible to cannabis use were recruited from Qualtrics in summer 2022. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the 3 (CWLs: none vs. textual vs. pictorial) by 3 (comments: none vs. anti-cannabis vs. pro-cannabis) conditions in an online experiment. Participants were exposed to three online marketing posts promoting marijuana edibles (randomly selected from a large pool, N = 1260), each with either no warning label, a textual warning, or a pictorial warning (text and picture), and with either five comments (pro- or anti-cannabis in valence) or none. Results showed that among adolescents, pro-cannabis comments increased product appeal (vs. anti-cannabis comments: b = 0.18, p = .025; vs. no comments: b = 0.21, p = .021), and did so more than young adults. For adolescents, only pictorial warnings reduced product appeal (b = -0.20, p = .028). For young adults, both pictorial (b = -0.18, p = .002) and textual warnings (b = -0.12, p = .029) reduced product appeal. Furthermore, both textual (adolescents: b = -0.20, p = .004; young adults: b = -0.15, p = .005) and pictorial (adolescents: b = -0.30, p < .001; young adults: b = -0.18, p = .001) warnings reduced cannabis use intentions. Findings support requiring enhanced CWLs accompany online marketing ads.