The Power of Narrative Storytelling: A Digital Campaign to Reduce Stigma Associated with Opioid Use Disorder

Background: Over 2 million people struggled with opioid addiction in 2018 with millions more impacted. Stigma associated with opioid use disorder (OUD) often prevents those suffering from seeking help and receiving treatment. Various national organizations, including the American Medical Association’s Opioid Task Force and the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, have called for awareness efforts through anti-stigma campaigns. Real stories can be effective in raising awareness that the opioid crisis affects everyone and can happen to anyone, which is crucial to successfully helping patients fight their addiction.

Program background: This is a federal campaign to promote real stories from real people affected by the opioid crisis and featured on www.crisisnextdoor.gov, which can help others recognize this pressing problem affecting all Americans, including family and friends, first responders and others in the community. User-generated video stories are helping to personalize the opioid crisis to reduce stigma barriers that keep people from seeking and receiving treatment. The campaign targets adults in media markets where there have been significant increases in opioid-related incidents and who are close to someone with OUD. Objectives are to create awareness of the opioid epidemic by driving audiences to view people’s stories on the crisisnextdoor.gov site and to share with others, and to encourage more people affected by the opioid crisis to share their own personal stories and to seek help. This communications effort uses a paid media approach, employing digital channels that include video to drive strong awareness by targeting users based on demographic attributes and viewing habits, display and social media ads that promote site traffic through a data-driven, cross-platform approach, and Google Search that delivers relevant messaging when users are researching information.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Initiated in late 2018, analysis of anti-stigma campaigns and available research guided initial message development. Through December 2019 approximately 265 million impressions of paid display, video, search, and social media ads will be placed online, reaching roughly 7.4 million people approximately 36 times. Employing a click-watch-click strategy, the display, search, and social ads are projected to result in a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.05%, and the video ads a completion rate (VCR) of 60%. Early results as of mid-February 2019 show over 25 million impressions have been generated across all channels. Additional analyses will assess whether exposure to paid ads was associated with campaign awareness.

Conclusions: This digital campaign primary objective is to drive awareness of the opioid epidemic and motivate audiences to learn more by accessing the CND website. Ultimately these campaign activities, along with key stakeholder outreach, will increase conversations about opioid use in traditional and social media, and raise audience awareness about the opioid epidemic across communities nationwide.

Implications for research and/or practice: Many people do not believe that the opioid crisis affects people like themselves. As there is an overall lack of research on stigma as it relates to drug abuse, so there a need for evaluating robust campaigns to address the issue.