National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and MedlinePlus Palliative Care Text Campaign

Background: Palliative care’s primary purpose is to relieve the pain and other symptoms associated with serious illnesses and improve quality of life. This text message campaign provided information about what palliative care is, the benefits of palliative care, and how to manage the symptoms of a serious illness. Messages included palliative care information for both adult and pediatric patients and their families.

Program background: Between February 5, 2018 and February 8, 2019, NINR and MedlinePlus ran a text message campaign on Palliative Care. The same campaign ran in Spanish between February 5, 2018 and August 2, 2018. The campaign in Spanish was shorter because of limited resources in Spanish.

Users who signed-up for the campaign received one text message per week throughout the year. About one month into the campaign, a decision was made to add a weekly e-mail option to this campaign to increase reach and meet the needs of our users.

Evaluation Methods and Results: By the end of the year, 3,143 subscribers signed up for the text message campaign in English and 944 signed up for the text message campaign in Spanish.

Of the fifty-six links shared via text message and e-mail, we received 16,039 clicks back to NINR and MedlinePlus content. There were an additional 6,413 page views of the MedlinePlus Palliative Care text message landing page. The analytics show that the most popular messages were that of mental health/emotional wellbeing and new research. Despite the campaign ending, we continue to receive clicks on those links.

Conclusions:

A successful campaign is determined by the number of people reached (list size, list growth rate), increased visitors to linked content, attrition rate and engagement rate.

In total, this campaign successfully reached 21,343 people.

The growth rate was steady and the campaign was successful in gaining new subscribers and retaining existing ones. Further, the attrition rate was low as less than ten people unsubscribed during the entire year.

Even though 16k clicks were logged throughout the year, the average engagement rate of a message was 1%, or only 1% of subscribers clicked the link of any message (text or e-mail).

Overall, this campaign was successful in reach—both list size, and list growth rate), but was unsuccessful in engagement.

Implications for research and/or practice:

A future campaign should:

• Include an e-mail option from the beginning. Even if a future campaign were centered on text messages, in order to reach a wider audience, it would be essential to offer subscription in multiple formats.
• Focus on more engaging content. Although the campaign was successful in gaining a steady stream of subscribers, the engagement rate was low. 1% of subscribers clicked the link in the message. This could be improved by creating action-based content that elicits a response from the subscriber.
• Limit links to only mobile-friendly pages. Text message subscribers and the majority of e-mail subscribers are accessing content from their mobile devices. As such, links to PDFs and videos are less likely to be clicked.