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ICE supports premiere of Cut Films

Cut Films | tell it | change it

As part of our commitment to The Deborah Hutton Campaign and our wider corporate social responsibility, ICE is contributing its time and expertise to the charity free of charge. This unique partnership has just seen an innovative new film competition and website launched to get young people producing short films that talk to their peers about the impact and dangers of smoking.

The first pilot of Cut Films will see young people from ten schools and a youth club making their own films to persuade their peers not to smoke. They’ll also be using the Cut Films website to ‘ping’ their uploaded films to social media sites such as You Tube, Facebook and Twitter.

As well as having created the brand identity, the ICE team has developed the websites for both The Deborah Hutton Campaign and Cut Films. We’ve also worked in partnership to look at how we evaluate the process of making the films. Using Social Marketing’s Total Process Planning Model, the young people will plan, test and make the films - recording their findings as they go online.

This evidence will be invaluable for the future: supporting schools with well-being indicators and PSHE, as well as academic studies in English, Technology and Creative Media. The initiative will be rolled out nationally next year.

Lucinda Shaw from the Deborah Hutton Campaign, said, “We’ve all been incredibly impressed by the skill and thoroughness that the work reflects, the good humour in which the project has been pursued by ICE’s team against a very tight deadline, and above all, by the generosity of spirit with which the entire undertaking has been approached.”

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Feature - from Page 1

By Amanda Jackson, Director of Social Change, ICE

It’s timely that as Alcohol Awareness Week (19 - 25 October 2009) was encouraging people across England and Wales to think about how much they drink, our social marketing team have been working with numerous PCTs and NHS Trusts to tackle a range of alcohol and drug related problems.

For us, the challenge is to identify and target different types of high-risk drinkers, and social marketing’s 5 step ‘total planning process’ (scoping, development, implementation, evaluation, follow up) lays the foundations for a patient-centred approach which addresses real, rather than perceived need.

An essential part of this process is understanding why people behave in the way they do and assessing what is needed to support them in making positive lifestyle changes. As social marketers, we believe it’s essential to take the message into the heart of communities - geographically, physically and emotionally. That’s why we work from within our communities, in locations ranging from GP surgeries and hostels to local gyms, care homes, leisure centres and pubs/clubs – it’s essential to meet people on their “turf”.

Currently we’re using full-time Alcohol Intervention Workers as part of the ASSIST programme, an alcohol awareness scheme being funded by Liverpool Primary Care Trust to specifically target, help and support communities across North Liverpool.

On a day-to-day basis, the Alcohol Intervention Workers offer free and non-judgemental information and advice, to raise awareness of the issues and help people make long-term changes to their drinking habits. They provide alcohol screenings, enabling people’s drinking habits to be assessed as ‘safe, ‘hazardous’ or ‘harmful’ and supporting positive, individual behaviour change.

Following the success of the initial pilot, the project has been extended for a further six months, and the Alcohol Intervention Workers have also just been commissioned to provide additional 8 week sets of support programmes to help individuals achieve more sustainable change.

I firmly believe social marketing techniques are helping us address deeply entrenched issues around alcohol consumption, by providing an effective, practical framework which many health professionals are now turning to their advantage.

Tackling alcohol abuse in our communities