Using Interactive, Audience-Specific Tools & Trainings to Veto Violence

Background: It started with a simple idea: how do we provide resources to bring our vision of a world without violence to reality? That question led to imagining one place, one home for inspiring hope, connecting prevention practitioners, and driving science into action to make violence prevention the premier public health achievement of this decade. In 2009, CDC launched the VetoViolence website.

Program background: VetoViolence has evolved over the last five years, with the addition of online trainings and tools. We designed each one to meet the needs of prevention practitioners, leveraging user-specific principles to create engaging, relevant, and highly-usable products.  As the site grows, the value of this approach—through multimedia learning theory, storytelling, engagement-oriented content, and audience-specific authenticity—increases as well. For instance, the Success Stories portal offers a place for practitioners to highlight their achievements. The portal is an interactive tool that leads users through the storytelling process. Authors receive a downloadable, printable narrative that doubles as a marketing tool for organizations working with limited staff and resources. The stories also provide successful violence prevention examples and opportunities for practitioners to learn from one another. The accredited and interactive Principles of Prevention (POP) online training provides essential fundamentals for programs focused on preventing violence.  This way, everyone who takes the training develops the same understanding of primary prevention, the social ecological model, and the “public health approach.” The training underscores the importance of a proactive approach to stopping violence, helping ensure prevention practitioners have the information they need to do so accurately and effectively. Dating Matters: Understanding Teen Dating Violence Prevention helps educators working to improve the health of teens. Based on insights from teachers themselves, the online, accredited course uses expert interviews, creative visuals, interactivity, and storytelling to communicate the relevance of violence prevention to their work. 

Evaluation Methods and Results: Resulting user traffic and accreditation completion rates indicate our messaging and education reach has grown.  Site visits increase with the launch of each new training or tool. In 2009, 1,237 visitors stopped by the site. In 2010, the launch of Dating Matters increased traffic to 26,753. The late 2010 debut of POP contributed to another boost in 2011: 86,954. In 2012, we added new content to support our youth violence and child maltreatment prevention efforts; that pushed us to 104,294. Our lifetime visits, since the site went public: 255,238.

Conclusions:  Not only are people stopping by the site, they’re staying.  Both trainings earn exceptionally high completion rates by registered users.  In 2012, nearly 90 percent of people who started POP and Dating Matters completed them. Building on the success with our current site, we will launch an improved VetoViolence this summer. 

Implications for research and/or practice:  Prevention practitioners are busy, short on time and resources, doing more with less, and looking for ways to maximize what they have. VetoViolence offers practitioners a customized, “one-stop shop” unlike anything else that exists today. By offering prevention practitioners what they need, we’re supporting their goals. By working together, we can prevent violence and its consequences, and move from science into action.