About this toolkit

A 2009 DH consultation showed that many PCTs are unsure about how to carry out fully effective social marketing activity. In response, DH developed 'Alcohol Social Marketing for England: Working to tackle higher risk drinking' in May 2009. This new toolkit builds on this previous guidance by offering more detailed information about social marketing best practice as well as tools to help you carry out segmentation and evaluation more effectively. We hope that this toolkit provides helpful guidance, allowing you to apply your communications and social marketing skills to develop effective local interventions.

New social marketing tools

Feedback from PCTs has identified segmentation and evaluation as the two areas that people find most difficult to carry out. To address this, two new social marketing tools have been developed. The segmentation tool will help you to define your priority audiences and work out exactly where they live in your area. The evaluation tool gives you both the principles behind evaluation, why it's so important and a practical step by step guide to evaluating your own social marketing programmes. Both tools can be used for social marketing programmes of all sizes.

Who is this guidance for?

This guidance is for marketing and communications professionals within PCTs, as well as the external agencies and local stakeholders that you work with to deliver your social marketing programmes. It aims to help you develop, deliver and evaluate your own social marketing activity to tackle increasing and higher risk drinking in your area.