Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership : Women's health campaign
Grass roots campaign to make women's health a priority
The context:
The promotion of women’s health remains a nationwide challenge and in 2022 the government pledged to improve access to services and improve outcomes through regional women’s health hubs. Bradford District & Craven (BDC) was to receive funding for such a hub, however, the community faces its own particular challenges around women’s health that would need to be understood and tackled for such a hub to flourish.
The area is home to a wide range of faith groups – among them Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh – and wide-ranging nationalities and languages, including English, Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Polish. With this diversity of culture comes also wide-ranging levels of acceptance of women’s health issues; in some corners of the community, women’s health is simply not discussed. The result is particularly wide health inequalities and an interesting comms challenge.
The Comms team at Bradford District and Craven Healthcare Partnership, led by Shak Rafiq, Strategic communications and stakeholder engagement lead, knew there was work to be done to launch the new women’s health hub in a way that is inclusive and well-received. ThreeTenSeven was invited to help them develop, plan and coordinate a community-wide campaign. The objective of the campaign would be to raise awareness of the new women’s health hub for BDC, to reach marginalised audiences and to encourage women to make use of the hub, from every background and culture. Shak is himself a passionate ally to women, and he also emphasised the need to reach allies, including men, who could spread the word and advocate for women.
Our approach:
From the outset, we recommended a truly collaborative approach, women-led process, and one that championed women’s voices at every stage. Shak appointed an all-female team at the Health and Care Partnership and championed their decisions. We deployed our own project team, led by MD Rachel Cook and Strategist, Em Blalock.
Our Insight process featured stakeholder interviews among GPs, Service leads, VCSE leaders and community representatives to learn more about the barriers that women face in coming forward to discuss their health. We uncovered four main themes true to the area:
- Accessibility: the community face very real, practical challenges in accessing primary care.
- Knowledge: there are gaps in education on women’s health which affect women's ability and willingness to seek help.
- Trust: we found an institutional, cultural lack of trust in healthcare systems, affecting engagement.
- Preventative health: a need for preventative strategies, to empower women to look after their own health before needing to seek support.
To move the dial on these challenges, and to move the audience through the funnel as we launched the new hub, we needed to help women to feel that they are being heard, to help them feel empowered to make decisions about their own health, and, yes, to then encourage them to seek support with their health.
We built a grass-roots campaign, working with the client to recruit local champions who would become community-based advocates for women’s health and ambassadors for change. We focused on owned and earned media, targeting community groups, and community ambassadors, creating forums for discussion and co-creation, and encouraging women to join the movement where it is ok to seek help for your own health, and to put yourself first.
We explored a series of creative concepts in a workshop with 20+ community leaders and champions, with their feedback directly influencing the development of the campaign through subsequent rounds of testing and refinement.
Design assets for the chosen route were co-created with local women, including a photoshoot featuring 16 local women who joined us for a fabulous day of photos, mark-making and inspiration. We commissioned Bradford photographer Keyhan Modaressi and created a huge bank of images and assets. Those who took part in the photoshoot who we invited to ‘make their mark’, pledging their commitment to improving women’s health. These ‘W’ marks were turned into campaign graphics, which we translated across all campaign materials, including pledge activities and on-site activation.
Throughout, we worked hand-in-glove with the client team, who shared ideas, inspiration and links with community organisations who would elevate the campaign – a truly collaborative effort.
Results:
The campaign launched in February 2025 with an all-day community event attended by 400 women, designed as A Day to Inspire Action, where we captured pledges and co-created campaign assets with the community.
Our MD Rachel also addressed a packed auditorium to explain the campaign journey and hosted a Q&A with the women from the photoshoot, inviting more women to get involved.
Results will follow as the campaign rolls out over the coming months and years.
“We already knew that when you bring together a group of women with a shared passion and different perspectives, something magic happens.
Developing this campaign together with the ThreeTenSeven team and our brilliant community advocates helped us bottle that magic. We all worked hard to ensure this was more than just a campaign; it was a movement grounded in the real experiences, insight, and priorities.”
