Implementing a Culturally Tailored Prostate Awareness Social Media Campaign for Black and Latino Men in Chicago

Background:

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of death in American men, with one in eight men being diagnosed in their lifetime. Black/ African American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hispanic/Latino men may have barriers to screenings, as they are less likely to have a regular primary care provider and may not have access to educational materials about prostate cancer and screenings in their preferred language.

Program background:

The Illinois Prostate Screening and Awareness (IL-PSA) program aims to provide community-based navigation for evidenced based outreach, education, and community linkage services to men, with goals of increasing prostate cancer screening rates and reducing barriers that prevent men from accessing screening services. The program centers on men ages 40-69 years of age who are high-risk male groups of Black Non-Hispanic, Hispanic/Latino, underinsured and/or uninsured. One program arm was conducting a social media ad campaign that addressed education, outreach, health disparities, and barriers for the priority populations. CAHE worked with a marketing team to develop 27 social media posts and radio ads focusing on priority population and their family members. Four community-based organizations reviewed the materials and provided comments. The ads were tested for two weeks and chosen based on highest engagement activity.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

The social media campaign’s 27 social media posts and radio ads were run through Facebook/Instagram and two radio stations named WPPN and WLEY, in two different languages (English and Spanish), between April and June 2022. WPPN had a total of 13 spots and WLEY had 84 spots. For Facebook/Instagram ads, there were total 25,395 click-throughs (number of times users clicked on the content to view it) with a rate of 0.54%. For the social media campaign in English, Black men older than 40 years had the highest number of click-throughs (n=3,622; rate=0.71%), followed by Latino men older than 40 years (n=3,317; rate=0.67%). However, the impressions and reach were highest for Young Black Men, with the lowest click-through rate. Similarly for the social media campaign in Spanish, Latino men older than 40 years had the highest number of click-throughs (n=3,546; rate=0.73%). CAHE also published the IL-PCOS-2022 program information and related resources on their webpage in both English and Spanish, for which the total viewers were 10,120 and 5,211 respectively.

Conclusions:

The IL PSA social media campaign reached 873,984 people and garnered 4,695,140 impressions in the three-month period. Creating culturally tailored materials with community members while focusing on communication channels are key to a successful media campaign.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Studies shows communities of color are disproportionally affected by cancer, including prostate cancer. Our campaign provides an example of how public health professionals can create tailored, unique, and culturally relevant materials to increase cancer screening awareness in communities of color.