Driving vaccination uptake to protect local communities for London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
Vaccine uptake has long been a knotty challenge for healthcare, and it hasn’t got any simpler since the pandemic. Having undertaken a Covid campaign for Barking and Dagenham in 2022, we returned to deliver two highly successful campaigns in 2023/23 focused on the Covid booster and MMR vaccination.
The campaigns were shaped through insights gathering via community partners, and for Covid, we identified barriers such as a lack of trust in the government and the vaccine itself, the belief that Covid had gone away, and concerns about side effects. We also learned there was a clear need for specific logistical information and to assert that the vaccines are free.
We worked with our client to define their target audience, using a behaviour change framework called APEASE. We were led to focus on simple messaging around the ongoing presence and risk of Covid right now in the borough – clarifying who is eligible, the ease and convenience of getting the free booster. We created a suite of multi-channel materials to drive people to pharmacy walk-ins and community pop-up clinics, and crafted messaging from behavioural insights (using the ‘endowment effect’) for text messages and posters.
The results were impressive; 1,107 Covid vaccinations were administered at 37 pop-up clinics, which we understand out-performed many other local authorities. Clinics that were promoted using behaviourally-informed text messaging drove almost six times the number of attendees compared to those promoted without the use of text messaging.
Barking and Dagenham then asked us to work on an urgent MMR campaign and we applied the same tested behavioural thinking used for Covid. Our messaging highlighted that cases were rising locally, specified who would benefit from the vaccines and where and when children could get them. Clinics were promoted to parents via text messages, school letters and posters, and evaluation showed that the texts (sent to 19,000 children’s parents) were the main reason parents attended the biggest pop-up clinic.