CARE Nigeria Works with Influencers at Scale for SBCC Campaign on Childhood Immunization

In the first four weeks of the 12-week campaign, 25 trusted messengers started conversations about childhood immunization and shared testimonials about their experiences with childhood immunization. They shared content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and WhatsApp private groups. This phase of the campaign reached over 100,000 people and the trusted messengers had an average engagement rate of 8%, which was double the goal.

In the second phase of the campaign, CARE Nigeria took the top engaged content and repurposed it for an advertising campaign on Meta. The 4-week campaign, which utilized ad credits donated by Meta, ran October through November 2022 to Nigerians in Yobe, Adamawa, Bauchi, and Borno State. The team identified these states as key focus areas partially due to a National Immunization Coverage Survey (NICS) that showed children in the Northeast being one of the populations least likely to be fully vaccinated and 42% not having any vaccinations.

In the third phase of the campaign, which is still ongoing, CARE Nigeria utilized Meta’s Lead Gen advertising format to launch an on-platform survey to understand the choices more deeply behind childhood immunization.

Results

In addition to understanding how trusted messengers performed overall, CARE Nigeria also wanted to understand if there was a performance difference between male and female trusted messengers.

• From a communication perspective, overall engagement of 25% was 5x higher than previous SBCC campaigns CARE Nigeria ran
• Female messengers had +337% higher video completion rates – 35% vs. 8% for male messengers
• Post reactions, shares and comments were similar across messengers.

Brand lift study results

For this campaign, Meta’s brand lift study tool helped to evaluate the possible shift in knowledge and attitudes. In addition to ad recall, the study asked two questions:

1. Safety: How safe do you think routine vaccinations are for children in your community?
2. Importance: How important do you think it is for a child to receive routine vaccinations to protect against disease?

Interestingly, while female messengers were top performers from a communications perspective, it was the male messengers that were more memorable according to brand lift survey results. When brand lift study results were analyzed by gender, male messengers were particularly memorable to women, who had a 10pt lift in ad recall vs. 5.6pt lift when recalling female messengers.

Like other SBCC campaigns, the baselines for Safety and Importance were high – 71% and 88% respectively. Meaning that 88% of the control group already thought routine vaccinations for children were important.

Despite the high baseline, there was significant lift for specific age groups. For example, women aged 45-54 who saw male messengers had a 6.9pt lift in their attitude that routine vaccinations for children were safe and 7.4pt lift in thinking the routine vaccinations were important.

Additionally, men aged 55-64 who saw female messengers had a 5.5pt lift in thinking the routine vaccinations were important.

What’s next?

CARE Nigeria is continuing their work around routine vaccinations by launching a WhatsApp chatbot to provide deeper information about their importance. The chatbot includes FAQs, vaccination schedules, and details on the nearest Health Centre based on the person’s shared location.