In June 2020, the Office of Minority Health (OMH), part of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the award of a $40 million grant to the Morehouse School of Medicine and key strategic partners, including the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC). Along with ICF Next, a global marketing agency, the FPRC is part of the communication cluster of the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network (NCRN).

In year one of this three-year grant, the partners have worked with community-based organizations across the nation to develop and test culturally and linguistically appropriate communication resources about vaccination for minority groups who have been particularly affected by COVID-19.

Throughout the project period, the FPRC team:

• Conducts literature reviews addressing current knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in regard to COVID-19 mitigation strategies.
• Helps develop the formative research plans and methodology.
• Provides training and technical assistance to community partners in using Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) to use social marketing to enhance messaging to specific audiences. CBPM is a program-planning framework developed by the FPRC that combines community engagement with social marketing to achieve sustainable change.
• Use neuromarketing methods to test communication materials. Neuromarketing uses physiological sensors to detect eye tracking, facial expressions and brain activity that reflect emotional response to a test stimulus, in this case, communication media developed for social media or print.

The FPRC team is training their third cohort of community organizations on what social marketing is and how they can apply it to COVID-19 vaccine uptake for the priority populations with which they work.

According to Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, a COPH alumna and assistant professor who is a co-principal investigator on the project, “What we found is that through our approach using the community’s expertise and building  a persona, we were able to provide a vivid representation of the community and identify some of the barriers to access and the reasons behind why a specific community may not be getting vaccinated.”

Pasha said that so far, the impact of their research has been successful in helping community-based organizations to see the benefit of tailoring messaging to fit their communities rather than relying solely on generic mass media that seek to appeal to everyone.

Angela Makris, COPH PhD student and research assistant for the FPRC, presented on their research using the CBPM framework and creation of population personas at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting from October 24-27.

“Our other role in the project is pretesting materials created by an ICF Next. We collaborate with the Muma College of Business Center for Sales and Marketing Innovation, which provides the neuromarketing research software. When we collect enough data across all of the tests, we will be able to create statistical models of how emotional responses relate to attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine, “said Dr. Claudia Parvanta, COPH professor and project principal investigator. “With neuromarketing we can test the effects of communications tailored to specific racial and ethnic backgrounds. We have long assumed this is better, but this project provides a chance to measure the effects on a deeper level than self-report.”

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Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health