Building Vaccine Confidence Amid COVID-19 With UNICEF

This article describes preliminary findings from the Insights for Impact program, a partnered project amongst Data for Good, UNICEF, and Facebook; in which public Facebook posts about vaccines within six countries (Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Ukraine) were analyzed. The project tested the effectiveness of different content, messages, and messengers in positively shifting knowledge and perceptions of vaccines and willingness to vaccinate. Across all these digital campaigns, vaccine information was disseminated to more than 102 million people. Early findings suggest that healthcare workers make powerful spokespeople and that authoritative, informative messaging is more effective than emotional messaging. However, the most effective strategies for communicating messaging did vary among regions. The research here shows that a one-size-fits-all approach is not effective in public health communication, specifically regarding messaging content and style. Global regions will respond to certain appeals differently.