South East London Cancer Alliance
Lung screening uptake from 39% to 56%
A programme reaching barely a third of the people it invited, in the communities least likely to come forward. We rebuilt the campaign around six behavioural personas and moved uptake seventeen points.
56%
Screening uptake across South East London, up from 39%
6
Behavioural personas built from Mosaic, focus groups, call logs and social listening
30+
Community events alongside the paid media, plus GP surgeries and voluntary organisations
The Challenge
The people the programme most needed to reach were the people least likely to come forward, and the reasons had very little to do with information.
The South East London Lung Cancer Screening Programme invites eligible people aged 55 to 74 with a smoking history for a quick lung check. It launched in 2022 to low awareness and uptake sitting at around a third.
The barriers were deprivation, smoking stigma, fatalistic attitudes toward lung cancer, low trust in health services, and the ordinary pressure of life in a dense and diverse urban area. A person who believes a diagnosis is a death sentence, and who half suspects they brought it on themselves, does not book a scan because a poster asked them to.
The brief was behaviour change at scale, not awareness.
They did not want a softer message.
They wanted the word cancer.
Local research told us something most health campaigns get wrong. The audience did not want a reassuring health-check euphemism. They wanted a direct message about lung cancer itself, because the softer framing read as something being withheld from them. Trust is built by saying the hard thing plainly.
Underneath the creative, six behavioural personas were built from Experian Mosaic data, focus groups, analysis of the booking call logs, social listening and published inequalities research. The call logs mattered most. They are a record of what people actually say when they are deciding whether to attend, rather than what they tell a researcher afterwards.
What We Did
Six personas, postcode-level media planning, and a presence on the ground as well as on screens.
Media was planned at postcode level, against data on media consumption and purchasing habits rather than broad borough targeting, so the plan concentrated where need and reachability actually overlapped.
Channels ran always-on across digital, out of home and TV, with retargeting following anybody who had already been exposed.
Community outreach ran in parallel, with a presence at more than 30 events, in GP surgeries and through voluntary sector organisations. For an audience with low trust in health services, the invitation landing in person from somebody local does work paid media cannot.
Creative was reviewed and optimised monthly against performance data, so the campaign that finished was not the campaign that launched.
The Results
A seventeen point rise in uptake, in the communities where uptake is hardest to move.
Uptake. Screening uptake across South East London rose from 39% to 56%. For a programme whose target audience combines deprivation, stigma and low trust in health services, that is a very large number.
Equity. The gains came from the personas the programme had previously struggled to reach, which is the whole point of planning on behaviour rather than on reach.
Method. Six personas, postcode-level planning and monthly creative optimisation produced a campaign that improved while it ran rather than being judged at the end of it.
Scale. The personas, the media model and the campaign framework are now being prepared for national roll-out across England.