Tool 1: Engaging 50-65 years old through social marketing

by Barbara, Bridget, Charlie, Sherihan, Kristen

This exercise followed on from the premise that ‘older people’ is not a homogenous group but a complex mix of needs: for engagement to be effective, older people as a demographic must be segmented to get a better understand differing needs.

As a group we chose to focus on the 50-65 age group – a group that is often unengaged and disengaged with public services. They present a good opportunity for targeted engagement to promote positive and active ageing, empowering older people to take control of the ageing process.

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Tool A: Service map

Title: Map of targeted services for 50-65 year olds
What is it for: to map services that 50-65 year olds need and the methods through which they are accessed/provided
What is it: an analysis of mainstream services that are accessed by 50-65 year, how these services are currently accessed/provided and how they could be accessed/provided.

How it works: we have listed a range of typical services that our target group will need and used post-it notes to analyse how information is currently conveyed (orange post-it notes) and new ways information could be conveyed (green post-it). The visual depiction of new and existing methods of access/provision enabled us to see both where more engagement is needed and where greater innovation is needed.

As well as mapping services, we have also identified barriers to developing new innovative ways of service provision – namely organisational culture; silo working, risk aversion in the public sector. Based on this we then identified the key messages about ageing and accessing services that we wanted our target group to adopt. To develop this further we used Tool B.

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Tool B: Persona

Title: User persona of a 50-65 year old
What is it for: to better understand the aspirations, behaviour patterns and attitudes of our target group.
What is it: a profile of a 50 – 65 year old

How it works: the user persona helps gives an insight into the lifestyle of a 50 – 65 year old to help generate more effective, bespoke methods of engaging them. By using a persona a more personal dimension is created that assists is better understanding needs/wants/fears and aspirations. It focuses on the needs of the target group rather than organisational needs/structures/cultures and helps to avoid using conventional ‘one size fits all’ methods of engagement.