Bristol City Council – Swap to Stop
On 22 October 2025, this year’s Orlo Spotlight Awards were presented as part of our BIG Social event in Birmingham.
Orlo’s Spotlight Awards recognise organisations making major strides in public sector comms, across a number of categories. The Best Use of Data award showcases teams that lean on data to back their decision-making.
This year, the shortlist included: Bristol City Council; Cadent Gas and Leicestershire Police.
And the winner was…. Bristol City Council for its “Swap to Stop” campaign.
For Bristol City Council, smoking is a complex issue. With a smoking rate that’s slightly above the national average (12.7%), there are also major differences across the city. In the city’s most deprived areas, one in five households include a smoker, whereas in other neighbourhoods it’s fewer than one in ten.
Beyond the obvious health issues for smokers, smoking also brings financial challenges – it costs the council around £427 million each year. The team calculated that cutting the city’s smoking rate by 6% could save up to £25 million through improved productivity, as well as lower healthcare, social care, and fire-related costs.
The solution
The “Swap to Stop” initiative is a national UK government scheme aimed at helping adult smokers to quit smoking by switching to reusable vapes.
Bristol City Council wanted to launch a local version of the campaign to tackle smoking rates and associated health issues, particularly in some of the city’s most challenging areas.
Target audience
The main target audience for this project was therefore “adults who smoke” in the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods. However, the council’s comms team still wanted to attract other “adults who smoke” across the rest of the city.
Campaign strategy
The team needed to make sure that the Bristol-wide campaign could be adapted to work effectively in other geographically dispersed areas, and they landed on a hyperlocal strategy. Drawing on local knowledge, as well as local volunteer Health Champions, Bristol’s comms teams developed location-specific social media assets and adverts using anecdotal local knowledge.
Below you can see three example assets, which all mention hyper-local landmarks in the target areas. These assets were used in social media adverts with specific geographic targeting:
These geo-targeted ads were mapped to wards with higher percentages of households with a smoker.
The results
- Campaign ads reached 244% of the estimated adult smoking population in Bristol, exceeding the “gold standard” of 90% reach of a target community for behaviour change campaigns.
- Facebook ads generated over 4,000 click-throughs to the sign-up website – four times exceeding its original objective.
- 2,810 people signed up to “Swap to Stop” in Bristol during the campaign period.
- 35% of sign-ups came from social media and adverts – equating to a high conversion rate of approximately 24.6%.
- In total, 6% (approx. 3,000 people) of the estimated 49,600 adult smokers in Bristol signed up to “Swap to Stop” during the three-month period of the campaign.
It’s plain to see that effective use of data was central to shaping the campaign, targeting audiences effectively, and measuring its impact on residents.
On winning the award, the team said “’We feel proud, it’s nice, it’s very exciting and we didn’t expect it… it’s nice to get an award”.
Congratulations, Bristol City Council – you trusted your data, and it absolutely paid off!
Campaign Sign-ups
2,810
Conversion Rate
24.6
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