Show, Don’t Tell – Advancing Health Equity with Success Stories

Background:

While health equity has received increased attention in recent years, making health equity actionable can be a challenge for public health organizations and partners. Communicators can help enhance the willingness and capacity of organizations to embrace health equity by elevating real-world examples of health equity efforts through storytelling.

Program background:

CDC’s Office of Health Equity (OHE) is committed to advancing health equity through evidence-based approaches and strategic partnerships. OHE’s Communications Unit collaborates with internal and external partners to develop and lead agency-wide initiatives that follow OHE’s three evidence-informed principles for health equity communication – meet the audience where they are, communicate health equity as a “we” issue, and frame health equity as achievable.

Success stories are an important strategy in framing health equity as achievable. OHE gathers, refines, publishes, and promotes health equity success stories through multiple platforms, including a web portal for snapshots and spotlights of health equity initiatives among CDC and partners – “Health Equity in Action” – and a more in-depth, conversational-style blog on health equity efforts – “Conversations in Equity.” OHE highlights stories that show community-level efforts, include diverse populations, and use culturally relevant approaches to reduce health disparities and advance health equity. Communicators use CDC’s Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication to ensure stories use non-stigmatizing language, a health equity lens, and plain language techniques.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

OHE’s success story platforms have increased in reach in recent years; monthly page views for “Health Equity in Action” increased by 159% from July 2022 to March 2023. Furthermore, OHE has improved its capacity in the distribution of success stories, with a five-fold increase in the number of “Conversations in Equity” blog posts published from 2020 to 2022. The Conversation in Equity blog posts garnered over 5,000 impressions on OHE’s Twitter and LinkedIn in 2022 which increased by 133% from 2021. The dissemination of these success stories has led to requests for OHE, as well as other CDC programs and offices, to conduct speaking engagements, lectures, and trainings with organizations across multiple sectors on health equity topics and resulted in the establishment of new partners. Further, centers, institutes, and offices across CDC regularly contact OHE to explore opportunities to feature their work as success stories. Comments to posts to the “Conversations in Equity” blog provide feedback on the success stories and engage viewers in discussions around health equity initiatives.

Conclusions:

Communicators can share health equity success stories to encourage awareness of and prompt engagement with health equity. These stories offer ideas for new health equity initiatives, help organizations see health equity in their everyday work, prompt organizations to consider innovative ways to incorporate health equity considerations into current initiatives, and demonstrate that health equity is achievable.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Public health organizations have an opportunity to advance health equity by sharing success stories. Communicators play a critical role in finding, crafting, and sharing these stories in a way that empowers communities, encourages readers to integrate health equity into their work, builds support for health equity initiatives, and sheds light on the path to health equity.