Where Online Meets Offline: Using MeetUp.Com Groups to Get People Vaccinated Against Influenza

Background:   While digital and social media provide platforms that go beyond exposure and awareness, they still present a challenge to public health communicators who struggle to use the medium to effect and measure behavior change. CDC’s 2011-2012 National Influenza Vaccination Campaign addressed these challenges by implementing an innovative social media program with MeetUp.com, an online social networking website where people with similar interests organize themselves online but meet up offline, to find the campaign’s at-risk audiences and encourage these groups to share flu vaccination messages and get vaccinated together. This presentation will look at the overall program, how the channel was determined to be appropriate for the audience, and the results.

Setting:  MeetUp.com groups nationwide.

Population:  General public in the United States with a focus on the following at-risk groups: chronic disease sufferers, pregnant women, people over 65 years of age, health care professionals, and parents of young children.

Project Description:  MeetUp.com recruited 75 groups across the country to support the CDC’s influenza vaccination campaign and National Influenza Vaccination Week (NIVW). Rather than their normal MeetUp activity, these groups would get vaccinated together. Groups were chosen because they were in a low vaccination location and/or they represented a campaign target audience as supported by CDC data.

Results/Lessons Learned: The MeetUp program has resulted in a total of 17 groups that got vaccinated together during NIVW. Combined with people who RSVP’d for their groups’ virtual events, the total number of people vaccinated was 302. Additionally, 58 other groups posted flu vaccination messaging for their group members. Each group has an average of 146 members, reaching more than 10,000 people total. By working with a social media platform where actions are a natural part of the way users participate, increasing the number of people vaccinated became a tangible goal for the campaign.