Case studies
Back to previous pageFRANK Stakeholder Awards winner - Drug leaflet for parents and carers
Area: London Winner: Croydon Drug & Alcohol Action Team, Jacqueline Cave, Young People's Co-ordinator, the police and the School Drug Education AdviserBackground and Rationale
Croydon Drug & Alcohol Action Team and its partners were keen to communicate and involve parents and carers in educating young people about drugs and so coordinated input from various different stakeholders and audiences to produce an informative leaflet. The leaflet provided information about drugs and the law and why young people take drugs. It also included national and local service details.
What made the leaflet an award-winning concept?
Multi-agency approach - Croydon Drug and Alcohol Action Team and its partners recognised the importance of consulting various other stakeholders and agencies to produce the leaflet. This project included working with the Police, for example, who were integral to informing the section on drugs and the law and the School Drug Education Adviser who led on designing the leaflet.
Breadth of distribution - By forging strong links with schools through the drug education advisor the leaflet was distributed trhoughout Croydon schools (including independent schools) as well as more widely across the borough. Young people in years 6 and 9 were encouraged to take these leaflets home from school and give them to their parents.
Effective targeting to parents and carers - The leaflet was designed for and tailored to this audience, specifically including information relevant to them, e.g information about the points at which young people might be vulnerable to taking drugs and reasons why young people may be taking drugs.
What Croydon Drug and Alcohol Team said about the FRANK stakeholder Awards
"The awards really got us thinking about the work that we do and how we could create more imaginative and innovative campaigns. Being part of the awards was also such a positive, good news story for the DAAT and its partners and a great way of seeing examples of work from other stakeholders. Since the awards we've tried to think of alternative and more up-to-date ways of distributing materials that we produce, for example by using PDF versions of materials in place of paper copies so they can be used in schools and target our audiences more effectively".
"These next 2009 awards provide an opportunity for stakeholders to share their experiences with one another - we think they're a great idea!".
Croydon DAAT on 'FRANK and the past five years'
"We've been working with FRANK since it first launched in 2004 and have found it a great help in encouraging stakeholders to share their knowledge and experience".
"As a priority High Focus Area we were one of the DAATs to run FRANK street marketing campaign, whereby young people were trained to deliver messages to their peers around drugs. These street marketing sessions were useful as they gave us a model of activity that we could tailor to suit local initiatives and also caught the imagination of providers to work together as a team. Our young people's services have also really taken this peer-to-peer street marketing model on board and evolved and continued to run other activities. Now we often run other campaigns at Christmas, working with young people to promote messages around sexual health and alcohol. We've also run cannabis focussed campaigns.
