Building the Evidence Base for Advancing Vaccine Equity

Background: The Partnering for Vaccine Equity (P4VE) program, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), facilitates a learning community where organizations are involved in education and outreach to help their communities confront the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Promising Practices project within P4VE supported community-based organizations (CBOs) in implementing tailored outreach strategies to build the evidence base for promising practices to advance vaccine equity.

Program background: We provided grants of $25,000 to support 18 P4VE-funded organizations to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a promising practices in one of three areas: 1) media-based outreach, 2) community-based outreach, and 3) vaccine events and partnerships. Selected organizations were nationally representative and served diverse target populations and were grouped in cohorts based on their focus area.

Evaluation Methods and Results: During a six-month period of performance, grantees created and carried out Action Plans for their practices, collected data to measure the effects of their efforts, and participated in 3 collaboration meetings to facilitate peer-to-peer information sharing and implementation support. Grantees analyzed their data and developed final reports on findings and lessons learned related to their promising practices.

In the vaccine events and partnerships cohort, grantees learned that attendance at events is highest when events are held in community settings and tailored to reflect the cultural identities of their target communities. Organizations also employed community ambassadors to share COVID information, which worked well when these “trusted voices” were representative of and lived in the communities where they worked.

Community-based outreach grantees refined their messaging by conducting workshops and focus groups and administering surveys with various target populations to assess vaccine literacy, hesitancy, and to better understand barriers to vaccine access.

Media-based outreach grantees used both social and traditional media to broaden their reach. Organizations discovered that involving community members in message testing and centering their experiences, stories and voices in brief videos was especially persuasive.

Conclusions: Extending funding to CBOs to develop and measure the effects of tailored strategies to engage with and meet the needs of their local communities is critical to advancing vaccine equity. Involving community members as partners in the design and execution of outreach efforts-built trust and fostered success.

Implications for research and/or practice: Despite society’s growing COVID fatigue, outreach to achieve vaccine equity as part of a broader public health strategy should continue. Providing dedicated funding to support data collection and analysis represents a valuable strategy for improving the effectiveness of community outreach efforts.