The Power of An Ever-Evolving Digital Strategy: Parents Are the Key to Safe Teen Driving Campaign Case Study

Background:  Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. teens, accounting for seven teen deaths per day in 2010. Research suggests that ongoing parental management and monitoring may be associated with fewer teen crashes. CDC’s efforts to address this issue include the development, implementation, and evaluation of a comprehensive communications campaign, “Parents Are the Key to Safe Teen Drivers” (PATK), that was pilot tested in 2009 and launched nationally in 2012.  The goal of the campaign is to increase parental awareness of the important role they play in managing their teenage drivers’ behaviors and educating them about high-risk driving activities.

Program background:  The primary target audience for PATK is parents of teen drivers. CDC used formative research to determine the most effective messages and channels through which to communicate with parents about safe teen driving. Since the launch of the campaign, our outreach strategies have evolved, and we’ve learned that our digital strategy needs continual evaluation.  When the campaign drafted its initial communications plan in 2006, the digital landscape included MySpace and Yahoo 360.  Our digital strategy focused on mommy bloggers.  As the years passed, we leveraged Facebook and Twitter through CDC’s official profiles, and then created our own profiles.  Recently, we began harnessing the power of Pinterest.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  We identified digital media as an important channel for reaching our target audience, yet our campaign budget does not allow for large-scale ad buys.  Therefore, we used research to determine how to prioritize our time and budget. We used tools such as Adobe SiteCatalyst, Facebook Insights, and a user survey.  In addition, the campaign served as a case study at the 2012 Tufts Summer Institute on Digital Strategies for Health Communication, where graduate students and public health professionals developed new digital strategies for the campaign.  With this research and data, we developed a new digital strategy that focused on actionable advice to parents, image-based social media posts, enhanced branding, and leveraged partnerships. As a result of the new digital strategy and the addition of digitally-skilled staff, from April 2012 to April 2013 we increased our Facebook following by 33%.  We also increased our Facebook engagement dramatically: engaged users increased 206%, page viral reach increased 645%, and page posts’ viral reach increased 37,900%. In addition, negative feedback from users decreased 40%.  Although our primary communications goal is raising awareness, we also have a secondary goal of driving traffic to our web site.  During this same year we saw a 54% increase in web traffic.

Conclusions:  Parents play an essential role in keeping their teen drivers safe behind the wheel. Increasing parental awareness about their role in safe teen driving through the PATK campaign’s digital channels can be an important component of an overall strategy to reduce motor vehicle crashes that involve teen drivers.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Our success with PATK’s digital strategy shows that by creating an ever-evolving digital strategy and dedicating appropriate staff resources, a program’s digital presence can be increased exponentially.