NAQC Newsroom: Research

Promoting Smoking Cessation among Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Lessons Learned from a Location-based

Wednesday, September 27, 2023  
Posted by: Natalia Gromov

Caldwell KK, Staples AH, Bnadad L, Lee JGL.
Promoting Smoking Cessation among Lesbian and Bisexual Women: Lessons Learned from a Location-based Media Campaign in Western North Carolina
Health Promot Pract. 2023 Sep;24(5):811-813. doi: 10.1177/15248399221083833. Epub 2022 Apr 7. PMID: 35392700; PMCID: PMC10481623.

Despite well-documented inequities in tobacco use for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations, there is little practical guidance for local public health officials on developing and implementing media campaigns that prioritize lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. In this practice note article, we describe the development and lessons learned from a location-based media campaign to promote tobacco use cessation and raise awareness of QuitlineNC among lesbian and bisexual women in Western North Carolina. The campaign used a digital approach based on cell phone locations and marketing profiles to deliver messages across 4 years (2018-2021). Considerations for practitioners include how our project required messaging adaptation to meet Google's restrictions against using the word "yours" and the importance of addressing privacy protection concerns with state officials to enable collection of outcome evaluation measures via a conversion pixel (code for capturing metrics).