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Adverse Childhood Experiences Campaign (ACEs)

Background...

Studies have found measures that build resilience have a significant mitigating effect on community-wide levels of mental health, physical health, problem behaviors, and school/work outcomes, regardless of community-wide levels of Adverse Childhood Experiences, low income, and race/ethnic composition. In 2019, GHN launched an extensive media campaign throughout our nine-county region to educate the public, as well as those in familial, social, religious, and institutional systems, on how to build community resilience.

Goals...

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Campaign’s goal was to build resilience at the community level targeting the societal systems that bear the responsibility of being and providing protective factors to raise resilient individuals. To determine the key messaging, GHN convened an Adverse Childhood Experiences Campaign Task Force comprised of 23 subject matter experts. The campaign’s focus was to raise awareness of trauma-informed practices as well as the N.E.A.R science as it pertains to child brain development implications.

Results...

Over the course of the campaign, nearly 5,000 individuals visited the Adverse Childhood Experiences Campaign landing pages. Of those visits 16% or about 774 individuals indicated a Spanish-language preference. The video developed for the campaign received nearly 6,000 views in English and over 3,000 views in Spanish. Google display ads were clicked over 6,000 times, receiving nearly 1.5M impressions.

In addition to paid media and trainings, earned media was leveraged to help spread word about the campaign. GHN task force members gave interviews on local radio programs KZTA (Spanish), KIT (English), as well as on Univision TV (Spanish). The Facebook post regarding these interviews received the greatest organic reach of 611 individuals with 16% engagement. Organic Facebook posts during the campaign reached 6K individuals with nearly 400 engagements. Paid Facebook ads received nearly 214K impressions and nearly 800 clicks.

Details...

Because the education and literacy level of the audience varied significantly, the campaign message was kept simple—to build community resilience. To reduce copy and encourage better understanding across cultural divides, images were developed through illustration and animation to depict protective factors and the outcome of reversing ACEs in children. To overcome misconceptions that race or income alone are factors for ACEs, the characters were developed in a variety of colors not associated with any race or group—colors that simply illustrated people, such as blue, purple, green, orange. Also, because the characters were developed in random colors, the campaign message was easily translated between English and Spanish, saving costs and allowing more of the budget to be allocated to the actual media placements.

A dual language, English and Spanish, web landing page served as the nucleus of the campaign. Media messages directed the audience to the landing page for education, resources, and an invitation to take action. While several organizations across the country have released studies and documentation about ACEs, protective factors, and resilience, we felt it was important to have one repository of information to pull those resources together, as well as a means to provide information about resources available within our local communities.

The landing page also provided a tool for measuring the success of the campaign. Site analytics tracked the number of visitors to the site, language preference, time spent on pages, video views, and links selected.

Program Lead...

Amanda Plumlee, Tribal & Community Engagement Associate