The South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) oversees public education in the state. Led by the elected State Superintendent of Education, SCDE works with the state board, local districts, and educators to improve education across South Carolina.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) is South Carolina’s primary agency for health and environmental issues. It oversees healthcare, disease prevention, environmental health, and pollution control in the state and coordinates responses during health or environmental crises.
The Challenge:
Both SCDE and SCDHEC sought to cut through the vaccine hesitancy that pervaded South Carolina, especially among parents. The Medical University of South Carolina reported in April 2023 that “South Carolina residents were more hesitant than Americans as a whole to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.”
This issue summarized a number of pressing community concerns, among them, a lack of trustworthy and high-quality information about the vaccines, a discernible lack of awareness about the availability and eligibility of child vaccinations, and a general disempowerment when it came to making informed vaccination decisions.
It became evident there was an urgent need to educate residents about vaccinations and emphasize the importance of consulting medical professionals to clarify doubts and misconceptions. This context set the stage for our subsequent intervention to empower individuals to make informed health choices.
XOMAD Solution:
In partnership with Chernoff Newman, an integrated communications agency, XOMAD executed a three-
phase program called #YouMakeTheCall focused on reaching parents of kids 5-11 throughout the State to spread education about the Covid 19 vaccine for kids and address any concerns.
Throughout the program, XOMAD’s proprietary technology engine facilitated the identification, vetting, and deployment of 258 trusted, local social media messengers across South Carolina through various social platforms to distribute messaging that championed vaccination, challenged vaccination myths, and fostered informed decisions for parents.
To make the information easier to digest, XOMAD, SCDE and SCDHEC developed pre-made PSA images, with easy-to-understand information about the vaccine for kids, that creators could post on their Instagram Stories alongside personalized content.
The Results:
- The campaign showed a clear link between increased impressions and more vaccinated South Carolina residents. The first phase marked an 18%+ boost in vaccinations among all eligible participants and a 24.6% increase among those aged 12+. Overall, the program helped South Carolina have a higher increase in child COVID vaccines by more than 25% compared to surrounding states with similar demographics.
- In the second phase, from May through July 2022, due to delays in content approvals, all creator content was deployed nearly all at once – offering a perfect case study that demonstrated the effectiveness of a scaled, target group of creators having several pieces of content appear in their target audiences’ feeds around the same time. This frequency resulted in a massive uptick in vaccinations that directly correlated shots-in-arms to campaign content. See efficacy chart below.
- Since SCDHEC and SCDE employed XOMAD’s Council platform that facilitates engagement between clients and creators, both departments supported questions from the influencers in near-real time, including troubleshooting difficult questions from their followers or by sharing resources.
- In all, over 2.5M South Carolina audiences saw multiple pieces of the 1K posts, often seeing five or more pieces of content, resulting in 113K interactions and vaccines in arms!
