Help Your Community Get Moving — with the Move Your Way Community Playbook

For 3 years, ODPHP worked with 10 pilot communities to implement, test, and improve the Move Your Way® campaign — the U.S Department of Health and Human Services’ promotional campaign for the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Pilot communities were diverse in size, location, and population — ranging from communities with over 2 million people like Southern Nevada to small cities like Streator, Illinois. Community partners included health departments, nonprofits, and other organizations focused on physical activity throughout the United States. They held events, started programs, and built partnerships to get people in their communities moving.

With their help and involvement, we developed the Move Your Way Community Playbook, an implementation guide to help organizations plan for, conduct, and evaluate physical activity campaigns and activities. It offers tips and resources for any community organization — no matter its size, budget, or prior experience with physical activity programs.

Community partners especially liked the Playbook’s easy-to-use, grab-and-go resources. Explore the links below to see how these resources can help you plan, promote, and evaluate your physical activity campaign — or download a zip file with all available PDFs

  1. Plan your campaign. It all starts with a plan, and we have resources to help. 
  2. Promote your campaign. Once you’ve planned your campaign, it’s time to tell people about it!
  3. Evaluate your campaign. See how your campaign is going — so you can keep doing the things that are working to get people in your community moving and find ways to improve the things that aren’t.

Want to learn more about how community partners implemented Move Your Way? Check out these blog posts:

  • Active Southern West Virginia built partnerships with local libraries and provided free obstacle course kits — so kids can get a dose of physical activity when they come for books and free Wi-Fi. 
  • Jackson, Mississippi, launched its campaign with a Move Your Way Try-a-Thon at a local mall, showing participants that physical activity can be anything from line dancing to playing games like Duck, Duck, Goose.

Use the resources linked above, the Community Playbook, and Move Your Way’s consumer-facing materials to help your community get moving!

Categories: health.gov Blog, Spotlight