The AFCON Campaign
Leveraging the AFCON Tournament to Reach People with Vaccination Messages
Last year, we were informed that Breakthrough ACTION would facilitate a four-country campaign leveraging the excitement about the Africa Cup of Nations to promote social norms around routine immunization (for children) and adult vaccination (including COVID-19). This was to serve as a reminder that we can be safe from vaccine-preventable diseases when we make the small, yet courageous, act of getting vaccinated.
We called this the AFCON Campaign.
This campaign was designed to reach people across multiple platforms: mass media, social media, through community engagement, and leveraging the audience and reach of health influencers.
Multiple data sets showed many men didn’t trust the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and often left life-saving routine immunizations for their children to their wives. We understood that every member of the family needed to be healthy for the whole family to be healthy. So while women love sports too, the primary audience for this campaign was men.
After months of fine-tuning the campaign, one simple message shone through: show your passion for the team that matters most. That team is your family. And it resonated with people’s love for sports: in this case, football and the fierce competition that is the AFCON tournament.
I was excited about this campaign. I believe that vaccines are safe and effective, but more than that, life-saving. Plus, I loved the intersection of social and behavior messaging in sports: something I love very much, even if my favorite sport is basketball.
So, I led the social media campaign for Nigeria. This meant developing a strategy for content dissemination for maximum reach and engagement, curating the best audience for the campaign, and identifying the most relevant influencers who could channel the campaign as organically (and sustainably) as possible.
Before now, I had reservations about working with influencers. Personal experience in this case trumped possible benefits. However, this campaign made me think outside my bias box to select people who could best fit the campaign. It was a lot of work and combing through thousands of profiles online but I was able to curate a list of influencers with the help of the very amazing Chibuike Alagboso.
From January 15 to February 29, I worked with four government agencies (National Primary Health Care Development Agency — NPHCDA, Ondo State Primary Health Care Development Agency -OSPHCDA, the Federal Capital Territory Primary Health Care Board — FCTPHCB, and Bauchi Primary Health Care Development Agency — BASPHCDA), and 27 health influencers across Nigeria to promote this campaign using our social media channels.
For free, this is the easiest campaign I have worked on. By extension, these influencers were the easiest people I worked with. My ask to the influencers and agencies was to make the campaign their own so that it was as ‘natural’ as possible. What we got as a result was the most beautiful campaign! People shared content in English, Pidgin, French, and Yoruba, and came out with such beautiful creativity! If you search #TeamVaccine right now on any social media platform, you will see what I mean. And this could only happen because we were deliberate about whom we wanted to be part of the campaign. This is a lesson for me about being deliberate and open. I look forward to working with influencers in the future!
Together, we shared 800+ posts and reached over 6.5 million people in our primary (Lagos, Rivers, and Abuja) and secondary (Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Benue, Cross River, Nassarawa, Kano, Plateau, and Oyo) locations for the campaign.
I am very proud of this campaign. The campaign materials were visually appealing and I connected to them very well. Imagine my delight in. sharing something that I actually like. As Dr. Olayinka Umar-Farouk, the Deputy Portfolio Director of Breakthrough ACTION-Nigeria noted, this campaign touched my head, heart, and feet because it had me working outside work hours. If anyone knows the 2024 Ramat, you know that is a rarity because I wanted to be more deliberate about resting after health issues that stemmed from being a workaholic. But…as I would say, when I love something, it isn’t hard to know. 😎😎
My desire is a Nigeria where people are healthy and safe from vaccine-preventable diseases so we can be at our most productive form for nation-building. I am proud to have contributed my part to this through this campaign.
Whoot whoot!
Here are more posters from the campaign and links to videos can be found here and here.
