Using Video to Mobilize Communities for HIV Prevention Among Black MSM

Background: CDC’s d-up: Defend Yourself! (d-up!) is an evidence-based intervention that helps organizations mobilize black men who have sex with men (MSM) to stop HIV. To expand its reach, CDC funded and co-developed an educational and promotional video.

Program background: d-up! is one of CDC’s interventions in the Diffusion of Effective Behavioral Interventions (DEBI) project. To expand the intervention’s reach, CDC funded and co-developed an educational and promotional video that used professional actors to portray a dramatization of a community-based organization implementing d-up! The video’s goal was to spur viewers’ interest, awareness, and action around HIV prevention for black MSM. The video is being used during CDC’s d-up! facilitator training to explain the intervention’s theoretical background, help build trainees’ knowledge and skills to conduct the intervention, and motivate trainees to adopt the d-up! model of community mobilization for HIV prevention. It is one of the first uses of video as a training tool for the DEBI program, and in HIV prevention work with black MSM.

Evaluation Methods and Results: The video, which was produced collaboratively with community experts, conveys the intervention vision of mobilizing black MSM to prevent HIV by showing a dramatization of an organization implementing d-up! The project team partnered with professionals who had in depth experience with the intervention, and who identified as black MSM. The video includes complex intervention elements, and depicts an underserved, ethnic and sexual minority community that is marginalized in both mainstream and public health media. The development and production process – from scriptwriting to casting to shooting to editing – was robust and representative of both the intervention, and black MSM cultural trends. As an introduction to each d-up! training, CDC will show segments of the new video and lead trainee groups in an exercise to identify social networks and demonstrate approaches to mobilize black MSM for HIV prevention.

Conclusions: Exposure to promotional aspects of the video is expected to convey the intervention’s unique model of community mobilization, and motivate the target audience of communities and facilitators to embrace and adopt the intervention model. Through training exercises augmented by the video, d-up! facilitator trainees will learn key intervention steps such as how to identify a social network and its friendship groups, and recruit, train, and support opinion leaders as they spread a message of safer sex and brothers supporting brothers among their friends.  

Implications for research and/or practice: To adopt a mobilization model, a community must understand and accept that model. In order to successfully implement d-up!, an organization must understand the resources and time needed to run the intervention, as well as key intervention tasks like identifying a social network. In order to produce a video that accurately and convincingly portrays underserved, cultural minority communities, practitioners must take a participatory approach and involve community members at all points of video development and production.