Social Behavioural Change Communications Campaigns: The Power of Context in a Fast-Changing Environment

Our strategy was to create short, memorable videos with bold graphics and fast-changing text to grab the viewer’s attention. The campaign ran for three weeks and reached 1,166,303 Facebook and Instagram users.

Round 1 results

Using Facebook’s brand lift tool, we surveyed an audience exposed to the campaign and not exposed to look for a difference in their attitudes towards behaviors known to prevent COVID-19. Because research shows that people’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors can be shifted by increasing their perception of social acceptance and norming, we hoped to see a 2-point lift or better with our audience, meaning that the people who saw the campaign were more likely – by two percentage points or more – to express positive attitudes toward the promoted behavior or question.

While we met and exceeded that goal in ad recall, we didn’t meet the target in seeing a difference in attitude or behavior around the social norms related to prevention as we had hoped. While our bold graphic ads were memorable, perhaps they left viewers with a slight impression of impersonality.

It’s possible that because our target group could not directly relate to other people, because there were no real faces in the ads, that they didn’t become fully convinced to trust the messages. CARE will continue to learn from this process and seek to apply these learnings to the design of future campaigns.

Learning and adapting

Based on the findings from the first round of the campaigns of both CARE CZ and other CARE country offices, CARE Czech Republic significantly modified its creative approach for its second campaign. It became clear that designing effective online Social Behaviour Change Campaigns can be quite tricky as they are strongly connected to subjective emotions, compassion, and trust.

In response, CARE Czech Republic launched a national pro-vaccine campaign that leveraged creative materials developed by the Czech Republic’s Ministry of Health. The campaign used various trusted messengers – doctors, nurses, parents, friends – to connect directly with the target group.

Quotes like “Let’s make the final step to end our loneliness” (said by friends and parents) or “Let’s make the final step to end our exhaustion” (said by doctors and nurses) were used to connect with the target group on a deeper level.

Letting people know that their problems are well-understood and offering a final solution were proven effective in the initial phase of the campaign conducted by the government at the beginning of 2021.

Round 2: The power of precise timing

The second round of the CARE CZ campaign using the government’s trusted messenger approach was carefully planned and launched in August 2021. Technically, the campaign performed well based on BLS findings.  However, this time national context and external impact strongly affected the campaign results.

People in the Czech Republic were enjoying a peaceful summer with almost no restrictions, let alone lockdowns. Moreover, with important national elections coming up, media were suddenly full of political campaigning focused on topics unrelated to COVID, leaving the pandemic all but forgotten.

Sadly, that’s the very moment that CARE CZ’s trusted messengers campaign was launched and delivered to people who felt like the problems mentioned in the ads were already in the past. Therefore, the relative power of the messages and the final impact of the campaign were affected.

Round 2 results

Again, the campaign ran for three weeks and reached 1,394,292 Facebook and Instagram users. CARE CZ’s ad recall was high among men and women in the 25-34 year-old age group, but achieving a 2 point lift around the importance of the vaccine was more elusive, though we came close with a 1.7 point lift among male 25-34 year-olds.

Overall results and learnings

Of the 2.5 million people reached with vaccine messaging over the course of our two campaigns, 5,000 more people, particularly men ages 25-44, expressed confidence that the vaccine was important, compared to the control group. These findings illustrate that online social behavior change campaigns have the potential to influence knowledge, attitudes, and behavior and may be a more powerful tool when deep understanding of the context and precise timing is ensured.

CARE CZ’s involvement in the global campaign helped our team develop new skills and capabilities in a field that may help all of us to fight the pandemic more effectively.

Even though the results of both campaign rounds were influenced by outside factors, the BLS findings showed a difference in attitudes among exposed and unexposed groups, indicating that the campaign may have had an impact on the behavior of the target groups and contributed to decreasing vaccine hesitancy.

Today, 58% of Czech citizens are now vaccinated. Still, at the very beginning of the fourth wave of the pandemic in the Czech Republic, it is clear that there is still a need for action.