The City of San José, the largest city in the Bay Area and 10th largest in the country, boasts one of the nation’s most diverse populations.
While this diversity represents one of the City’s greatest strengths, it raises challenges for City Hall to reach each population with limited resources and time. COVID exacerbated this challenge, as the City had a hard time convincing its Black, Hispanic, and Vietnamese residents that the vaccine was safe and effective.
Through a groundbreaking partnership fostered by the Knight Foundation, XOMAD helped the City of San José reach these groups, becoming one of the nation’s leaders in vaccinations via an award-winning influencer marketing campaign.
XOMAD Solution: #ThisIsOurShotSJ #StayHealthySJ
First, XOMAD leveraged its proprietary technology engine to find and vet 49 trusted, local San Joséans that were Black, Hispanic, or Vietnamese, and had social media followings between 1,000 and 150,000.
XOMAD deployed these thoroughly vetted creators in a multilingual, digital door-to-door campaign aimed to increase trust in the COVID vaccine and encourage shots-in-arms among Black, Hispanic and Vietnamese San Joséans.
To increase trust between City Hall and the creators, and to develop a sense of community among the trusted local messengers, XOMAD onboarded creators into a private community on The Plug, XOMAD’s proprietary community platform. In the “San José Community Messengers” group, creators, City officials and XOMAD discussed conversa
tions, reactions and issues raised by the creators in response to campaign content.
The private community also allowed the City and the creators to act quickly against the rapidly changing vaccination landscape. For example, the City would decide (sometimes with as little as 24 hours’ notice) to host vaccine pop-up clinics in areas of the City that were most vulnerable, most lagging in vaccinations, or suffered from lack of access to vaccination sites. Since creators were already vetted, briefed, and onboarded onto a platform that facilities collaboration, creators were able to be deployed at a moment’s notice, like an always-on street team.
Throughout the campaign, XOMAD and the City of San José developed pre-made PSA updates in multiple languages about updates in guidelines, resources available, and flagging late-breaking updates like the pop-up vaccine clinics.
Results:
The campaign helped the City of San José become the first city in the country to reach President Biden’s 85% vaccination rate target, which the campaign helped the City achieve quickly!
In all, the 49 trusted, local social media messengers created 339 posts that resulted in more than 3 million impressions. 85% of the reached target audience identified as one of the three demographic groups the City aimed to reach.
For its deployment of trusted, local influencers to increase vaccinations, the City of San José received the Award of Distinction from the California Association of Public Information Officials (CAPIO).
Their work was also featured in research by the Engagement Lab at Emerson College in a report highlighting innovations in city governance that increase trust between city governments and its residents.
Learn more about using local, trusted influencers to distribute public health messaging. Get in touch today.