National Social Marketing Centre

Rowena and I had another two good days in Finland last week after my previous blog. We had a great response to the session we ran at the University with lots of people interested in finding out more and looking forward to the translation of our Big Pocket Guide into Finnish.

We even got mentioned on someone’s Facebook page – a sure sign of success (although to be honest I have no idea what they said so it could have been good or bad!). I also had the best compliment ever when someone said that they 'liked my boxes!’

During the two days we worked on three different projects, a smoking one, a wellbeing project for young unemployed men and a national child welfare programme with a number of project teams. It was amazing to discuss the complexities of a social marketing programme with people using their second language, it was incredibly impressive, particularly as I struggled to remember the Finnish for 'thank you' after three days. However I did make a public commitment that I would learn an old Finnish children’s lullaby by the time we visited again. I got a Finnish colleague to sing it for me so I could record it and hopefully next time I can sing it as well as the delegates sang Row Row Your Boat in the university session on Wednesday.

As well as working on the programmes we also had time to visit a Finnish sauna and followed Finnish tradition with dip in the sea afterwards – cold but very very cleansing and refreshing. During the sauna visit we discussed with a number of organisations how they want to embed social marketing in Finland and how they can learn from The NSMC’s experience in England. We provided a number of suggestions and it will be really interesting to see how it develops over the next few years.

All in all a great visit, lovely country, lovely people and I really hope we get to go back so I can meet Santa!