The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: To highlight the work of the North American Quitline Consortium's Promotions Task Force.

Methods: In August 2005, the North American Quitline Consortium established the Promotions' Task Force. The invited members included state, provincial and federal funders; national and community organizations; service providers; researchers; and promotions experts.

The Task Force sought to achieve two main goals:

1) To identify and establish a communication channel between state/provincial quitlines (including the funder, administrator and service provider) and national funders and other relevant national organizations to facilitate information exchange on promotion activities and assure that quitlines know about promotion activity that may affect their call volume. In addition, the communication channel would serve to build relationships between community, state/provincial and national partners.

2) To develop a report that synthesizes current knowledge about promotion of quitlines, including types and sources of promotion activity, their influence on call volume, the factors that make a promotion activity successful (including the influence of consistent or divergent messaging), the cost of promotion, and other important issues. The report will provide recommendations about high quality and effective promotion activities, ways to integrate cessation promotion into broader anti-tobacco campaigns, and options for addressing the tension between caller demand, quitline service capacity, and service quality. This work will be based on published literature and experience in North America and abroad.

Results: This session will highlight concrete examples of the communications channel including a nationwide promotion developed by a major US news network and give an overview of the knowledge synthesis report.