Who do you turn to when making decisions about your health? Which figures command credibility in your life?
While healthcare professionals provide essential guidance, many also look to family, friends, and community influencers as trusted sources for advice and models to emulate. Recognizing this reality, our team collaborated with local leaders in the refugee, immigrant, and migrant (RIM) communities to build Vaccination Is—an adaptable, community-driven, COVID-19 vaccine confidence campaign toolkit for community organizers to use nationwide.
Over a four-month period, we worked with eight co-designers representing the Iraqi, Ukrainian, Latinx, Haitian, Somali, Bhutanese, Congolese, and Afghan refugee communities who shaped every aspect of the toolkit’s design. By the project’s end, the campaign toolkit included seven templates and 103 assets including social media posts, print and digital posters, facts sheets, and stickers spanning 11 languages.
Where Customization and Scale Meet
Confronted with a rapidly evolving disease, we found ourselves in a high-stakes race against time. Our challenge was twofold: address the unique needs of each RIM community and build a scalable campaign that could meet the urgent needs of the moment. We began by tackling the former.
Alongside our co-designers, we conducted in-depth, ethnographic interviews to gain insights into cultural norms, vaccine hesitancy, circulating myths, and aspirations of each community. We learned that the Somali community in Minnesota needed to see prominent Somali figures like Representative Ilhan Omar represented in campaign materials—not just people who resembled them. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian community responded best to messaging that emphasized personal agency and choice over directives.
After building campaign prototypes and conducting interviews with community members through focus groups, WhatsApp feedback sessions, and one-on-one interviews, we further honed our assets. Throughout this process, our co-design approach aimed to redistribute power, encouraging community members to offer ideas, test concepts, and contribute to decision-making processes, resulting in vaccine messaging that truly reflected the communities’ voices and values.
Next, we turned to the question of scale. Recognizing that the language and the visual elements would not be universally resonant, we built user-friendly guides that enabled users to swap in their own messaging, color schemes, and photo content that would best resonate with their communities. All of these materials—templates, assets, and guides—were made available on Google Slides to ensure widespread accessibility.
Vaccination Is became an open-source campaign, available for anyone to download and customize based on their community’s specific needs. It promises adaptability and widespread adoption.
Impact
Our co-design approach was pivotal Vaccination Is’ success driving usage among community-based organizations and increasing vaccine confidence amongst target communities. By bringing in community co-designers, we were able to accelerate the development and refinement of culturally resonant materials while fostering a sense of ownership of community organizers who would soon implement these campaigns.
As of February 2024, the Vaccination Is campaign materials were downloaded 9,374 times across all 11 available languages. Print resources were accessed almost times as much as social media resources, indicating that our strategy for the campaign to be distributed both digitally and physically—in places of worship, community centers, clinics—was a success.
This project is part of our Vaccine Confidence Program.
