Opportunity
Clostridium difficile (C-diff) is a serious and often preventable infection linked to more than 20,000 deaths annually in the U.S. When the DFW Hospital Council Foundation secured a federal contract to address the issue, the mandate was clear: educate North Texas consumers, physicians, and healthcare workers on prevention.
But awareness alone wasn’t the barrier. The real challenge was behavior.
Preventing the spread of C-diff depended on consistent, everyday actions—yet public health messaging around infection control is often complex, clinical, and easy to ignore. Reaching a broad, mixed audience with varying levels of medical knowledge required more than education. It required clarity, simplicity, and immediate relevance.
The goal wasn’t just to inform—it was to drive widespread, measurable behavior change across the community.
Strategy
We built a campaign around a single, high-impact behavior: washing hands with soap after using the bathroom.
Rather than overwhelming audiences with multiple prevention tactics, we distilled the message down to its most essential and actionable form. This clarity became the foundation of a fully integrated awareness campaign designed for scale and consistency.
A unified message was deployed across channels to ensure repetition, recognition, and recall—reaching consumers, healthcare professionals, and community stakeholders alike. Creative execution focused on making the behavior simple, memorable, and easy to adopt in everyday life.
By aligning message, media, and audience around one clear action, the campaign removed friction and made participation intuitive—turning a complex health issue into something anyone could help prevent.
Impact
The campaign delivered measurable awareness and behavior change across the DFW community:
- 60% increase in C-diff awareness
- 76% of campaign viewers reported changing their behavior, specifically washing hands with soap after using the bathroom
- Nearly 8 million impressions generated in just two months
- Most importantly, the campaign successfully translated awareness into action—demonstrating that large-scale public health initiatives can drive meaningful behavior change when messaging is clear and focused.
Key Takeaway
When tackling complex public health challenges, more information isn’t the answer—clarity is.
By focusing on a single, proven behavior and delivering it through a consistent, integrated campaign, it’s possible to move beyond awareness and create real, measurable change at scale.
