Abstract
Background
Social media influencers are increasingly being positioned by health campaigns as trusted messengers who can share public health information with their communities. There is also an opportunity for campaigns to work with unpaid, digital volunteers (DVs) who want to use their platforms for good, despite not being compensated. DVs are a cost-effective way of supplementing an influencer-driven messaging campaign.
Evaluation Approach
Our influencer and DV network, El Beacon, aims to spread pro-COVID-19 vaccination messages on social media to the Hispanic community. Since 2021, 3,001 DVs have been recruited. Process metrics related to DVs are tracked using a variety of software including Facebook ads manager, Sprout Social, and Hubspot. Metrics received include the number of volunteer sign-ups, cost per lead generated, ad performance, organic and paid impressions and engagement of ads and El Beacon social content, newsletter open rates, newsletter clickthrough rates, and newsletter engagement.
Implications for practice
Understanding best practices for recruiting and retaining DVs for a public health campaign can help other practitioners optimize their experience working with DVs. Some of these best practices include: identify a specific DV target audience that will be most receptive to your message and best reached by your recruitment efforts, be responsive to what resonates with your DVs, be flexible in how you define “network engagement,” and use paid influencers to help build momentum.
Keywords
Assessment of Need
Social media influencers are increasingly being positioned by health campaigns as trusted messengers who can share public health information with their communities (Bonnevie et al., 2020; Deloitte, 2021; Hello Partner, 2021). Research has found that influencers can be used to positively communicate health information, especially about vaccines, to their audiences (Bonnevie et al., 2020). However, working with social media influencers can be costly or time-consuming, rendering them an inaccessible or unscalable intervention. Either in conjunction with or instead of paid influencers, campaigns can collaborate with digital volunteers (DVs) willing to use their online platforms to promote public health, without compensation. This practice note provides an example of working with DVs and outlines best practices for practitioners who want to collaborate with DVs in future campaigns.
Strategy
Since 2021, The Public Good Projects (PGP), Hispanic Communications Network, and World Voices Media have collaborated on a nationwide, multifaceted campaign to increase confidence in and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines among Hispanic populations. As part of this project, PGP created an influencer network called El Beacon, comprising both paid Hispanic influencers and DVs who would spread pro-vaccination messages on social media (Silesky et al., 2022).
PGP recruited 3,001 DVs nationwide to the El Beacon network through a combination of strategies. These included: (1) having Hispanic paid influencers promote El Beacon sign-up in their posts; (2) creating paid recruitment ads on Facebook and Instagram tailored toward the desired DV demographic; (3) posting recruitment information on the branded El Beacon social media handles; and (4) featuring the DV sign-up prominently on the El Beacon website. PGP used community feedback and ad metrics to determine the messaging that was most effective at converting viewers to volunteers. For example, ads featuring a person’s face had a higher conversion rate than those that were just text and graphics. There was no vetting process for DVs and we did not collect social media handles when they signed up. However, our website clearly stated expectations for DVs and the mission of the campaign; as such, we trusted DVs who took the initiative to sign-up to be authentic, trusted messengers for El Beacon.
After signing up, DVs received an initial series of emails that welcomed them to El Beacon, collected demographics and motivations for joining, and provided them with calls to action (CTAs) such as posting pre-made social media assets or pre-written captions for user-generated posts. Subsequently, DVs received date-based emails aligned with holidays and COVID-19-related news alerts. These emails contained CTAs, example posts from paid influencers and activations, such as giveaways. We did not have any instances of DVs spamming the El Beacon account, misusing the #elbeacon, or using our content in a negative way.
When DV’s posted content, they were asked to either tag El Beacon’s social handles or use the #elbeacon, which allowed PGP to track their posts. This approach does have limitations: we were unable to track reach or engagement with posts made on private profiles or for those that posted publicly but did not tag El Beacon. Process metrics related to DVs were tracked using various softwares, including Facebook Ads Manager, Sprout Social, and Hubspot. The metrics included the number of volunteer sign-ups, cost per lead generated, ad performance (including reach, likes, comments, and clicks), organic and paid impressions and engagement (including likes, comments, saves, shares, and video views) of ads and El Beacon social content, newsletter open rates, newsletter clickthrough rates (percent of people who open the newsletter who click on a link inside the newsletter), and newsletter engagement (including time spent reading the newsletter, unsubscribes, and number of people who clicked on each link).
Lessons Learned and Implications for Practice
The project successfully recruited more than 3,000 DVs interested in using their social media platforms to promote pro-COVID-19 vaccination messaging online during the pandemic. By appealing to DVs’ desire to use their platform to benefit their community, the project extended its reach, within budget, beyond the use of paid influencers. Our project demonstrated the feasibility of recruiting DVs to be unpaid and trusted messengers.
We identified four best practices for recruiting and retaining DVs in a public health campaign that can help other practitioners optimize their experience working with DVs:
1. Identify a specific DV audience that will be most receptive to your message and best reached by your recruitment efforts. When we started El Beacon, our prioritized DVs were any Hispanic adult in the United States. Over time, we narrowed our recruitment efforts to Hispanic millennials in the United States, as millennials may have sway over medical decision-making by both younger and older family members (Flinn, 2018). By narrowing our DV recruitment efforts, we were able to hone content and messaging around the group’s commonalities and make our DV materials more specific to their needs and interests. For example, we were also able to incorporate messaging and resources related to the specific health-related social needs and health inequities DVs or their families faced. Having a smaller priority recruitment group guided our visual design choices and choice of social channels.
2. Be responsive to what resonates with your DVs. We found that recruiting and activating DVs was nonlinear, with interest in COVID-19 vaccinations spiking when boosters were released and prior to a new school year. As such, we tailored our communication with DVs around specific holidays and events when their interest in our messages would be highest. For example, we hosted an International Women’s Day giveaway, which we launched in collaboration with our paid influencers. This activation leveraged an existing social media trend of posting about loved ones on this day and appealed to our DVs’ sense of community and family. To encourage network engagement, we provided DVs with our paid influencers’ posts as examples that they could adapt for themselves. This strategy helped build momentum and encouraged DVs to engage with the activation in a way that felt authentic.
3. Be flexible in how you define “network engagement.” Network engagement can take many forms, such as DVs posting user-generated content (UGC) or reposting campaign content. However, network engagement can also include lower-lift actions such as commenting or liking paid influencers’ posts or campaign posts. We found that encouraging DVs to engage with the campaign’s paid ads or El Beacon content in any way possible helped increase the visibility of that media and spread the campaign’s messages. When we provided lower-lift CTAs such as liking or commenting on posts, we saw even more DVs take action.
4. Consider using paid influencers to help build momentum. Through our experience with El Beacon, we learned how helpful it was to engage paid social media influencers in conjunction with DVs. Our paid influencers were able to frame their involvement as part of the El Beacon network and discuss the importance of others getting involved in an activation, which spurred DV sign-ups and participation. Likewise, our paid influencers were able to build momentum for a giveaway activation that DVs could then share, comment on, or copy. Paid influencers’ posts were also given as examples to DVs that they could reference when creating UGC. We found that engaging even a few paid influencers in a campaign increased our number of DV sign-ups and participation.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note:
The authors would like to thank Grant Jape for his support. The project was funded by the CDC Foundation under a financial assistance award supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) totaling $25,660,048 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS.
Ethics Approval
This protocol was determined to be exempt from IRB review by Advarra IRB.
