Koori Quit Line - Cancer Institute NSW — Social Media Strategy and Engagement
Koori Quitline enhanced digital engagement among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through culturally-led content, and a community-centred and supportive online community, celebrating each step of the way to empower people to navigate their quitting journey with confidence.
About the project
In 2020, we partnered with the Cancer Institute NSW to breathe new life into the Koori Quitline social media presence. Our goal was simple but ambitious: to create a vibrant online community where Aboriginal people across NSW and the ACT could find the information, support, and inspiration to quit smoking. The project focused on increasing engagement and positive outcomes by building a tailored, relevant, and culturally safe digital campaign and information platform.
While the service was already established, the goal of this partnership was to transform its digital presence from a standard health channel into a vibrant, community-led, co-designed online community. Our mission was to move the needle from simple follower counts toward genuine community connection.
The challenge
The primary challenge was a legacy of "business as usual" health messaging that didn’t connect with the community. The existing content was often clinical or narrowly focused and struggled to resonate with the diverse lived experiences of Aboriginal people. Through our initial audit of the existing channels, we identified a critical engagement gap: traditional anti-smoking advice felt like a lecture rather than a conversation. We needed to broaden the narrative to focus on self-agency, family, and respect for Elders. Additionally, managing a community in this high-stakes health space required a robust moderation framework to ensure conversations remained safe and supportive.
The solution
IM facilitated a comprehensive, culturally led strategy grounded in co-design with Community, using the visual language of contemporary Indigenous art styles and layering images, sounds, and text to create an engaging experience. We established a weekly rhythm with content pillars: Motivational Mondays, Champion Updates, and Meme Sundays, using humour as a universal language to lower barriers to entry. A key tactic was developing a Digitool Kit that empowered the Community with templates and guides to share their own success stories. To humanise the service, our team travelled to regional events to capture authentic content from "Community Champions," ensuring the Quitline was represented by real faces and authentic stories.
The results
The project successfully developed Koori Quitline from a static page into a lively and supportive online community and forum, where members encouraged each other to succeed. By personifying the service and centring real-life success stories, we broke down clinical barriers and humanised the quitting journey for pregnant women, young people, and rural communities alike. Ultimately, the project demonstrated IM's capability to manage high-stakes government health briefs with sensitivity, delivering a scalable strategy that maintained a reliable, professional, and deeply "Koori" digital voice from 2020 through to 2023.
Project services: engagement, communication
