Boost your wellness IQ: BCFG and CNN launch 30-day daily quiz challenge
A team of researchers (including CHIBE affiliates Drs. Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth) have partnered with CNN to offer a 30-day program designed to boost your wellness IQ.
This program – Health Daily – launched on September 23 and involves short, daily quizzes to teach you important facts about healthy living. Sign up here for the challenge.
Health Daily was created by Drs. Milkman, Duckworth, Katie Mehr from the University of Alberta, and the Behavior Change for Good (BCFG) team. The project received funding from CHIBE’s Roybal grant.
Find CNN’s coverage here: Smart wellness goals are backed by science-based studies. Be part of one.
CHIBE spoke with Dr. Milkman for a Q&A about this study.
What do you hope study participants get out of this experience?
We hope that this program will give them helpful information about lesser-known ways to improve their health. We all understand that it’s important to eat right and exercise, but what exactly are the mechanics of that?
We’ve built what we hope is a fun and engaging way to gain this knowledge in bite-size, daily doses. And of course, knowledge is power!
Just as many people sign into Duolingo each day to accelerate their language learning or Headspace to practice mindfulness, they can now come to Health Daily to boost their wellness IQ.
Do you have any fun behind-the-scenes details about the work it took to design this study?
It took us over a year to build this program and required partnerships between engineers, behavioral scientists, experts on sleep, nutrition, and physical fitness. Hundreds of Penn undergraduates were involved in testing the program to ensure it was working smoothly before we launched it publicly with CNN.
The partnership with the University of Alberta is thanks to the involvement of a former Penn PhD student who began this work during her graduate studies and is now a faculty member at the University of Alberta.
Could you tell us about partnering with CNN to promote this? Do you have any tips for researchers who might want to partner with a media outlet in a similar way?
In the process of promoting my book, HOW TO CHANGE, I met and interacted with a wide range of reporters who cover health and wellness. One of the people I encountered was a senior editor at CNN’s Science and Wellness desk who was particularly interested in covering behavioral science insights from my research. We worked together repeatedly on different articles that shared my findings on CNN.
That connection led our team to pitch a partnership to this senior editor who was excited about the opportunity to cover not only the results of an important study on wellness but also the experience readers of CNN would have participating in the creation of new scientific insights.
A tip for researchers who might want to partner with a media outlet in a similar way would be to keep track of the reporters and editors who have covered your research in the past. Then reach out to those contacts if and when you might want to partner on a project like this.