Building Confidence to Continue Routine Immunization During COVID-19: UNICEF Ukraine Insights for Impact Project with Facebook

This case study describes how a national awareness campaign using Facebook advertisements in Ukraine was used to remind parents and caregivers of children the importance of completing all routine vaccinations on time as well as highlight the new safety measures that local health centers were using to keep health workers and families safe from COVID-19. In recognizing trust in public health authorities is not uniformly high, UNICEF Ukraine recognized that the campaign’s success depended on crafting messages that mitigated public concerns about vaccination safety during COVID-19. UNICEF partnered with the Yale Institute for Global Health and Facebook to test two message framings (rational and emotional messaging) to determine how well the messages resonated with the target audience that included parents and caregivers between the ages of 18 and 65 years of age. The campaign reached nearly eight million people, and the rational advertisements proved most effective in combating a national lack of trust in authority with grandparents identified as the most important vaccination advocates within households.