Vetoviolence: Helping to Stop Violence before It Starts

Background:  CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention’s (DVP) developed VetoViolence: an engaging, interactive online portal. A place that provides education and inspiration, connects prevention practitioners to the information and tools they need, and supports their work to prevent violence and foster safe and healthy communities.

Program background:  Originally launched in 2009, DVP unveiled an improved version of the site in the fall of 2014. The updated site features improved user navigation, an updated infrastructure, and a way to highlight DVP’s most recent violence prevention-related releases and resources. Housed within the site: violence prevention basics, information organized by violence type, and 11 unique tools and trainings developed over the seven years the site has been in existence, including: 

• Community HealthSIM: A game-like experience that demonstrates the connections between violence and community issues.
• Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Interactive Infographic: highlights how abuse, neglect, and early risk factors for violence affect our lives and our society—and what we can do to prevent them.
• Principles of Prevention:  An online training explaining how to apply the key concepts of primary prevention, the public health approach, and the social-ecological model to violence prevention work. 
• Success Stories: A tool practitioners can use to create, save, download, and edit stories of successful violence prevention efforts.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  CDC monitors VetoViolence website traffic and the usage of tools and resources. Data show that with the addition of each new tool and training, traffic to the site increases. In 2009, 1,237 visitors visited VetoViolence. At the end of 2015, the total number of users who stopped by the site had grown to 1,374,293—an increase of 100,000%. Not only are people stopping by, they’re staying: In 2015, an average of more than 85 percent of people who started the accredited trainings available on VetoViolence—Principles of Prevention, Dating Matters, and Understanding Evidence—completed them. The metrics for the VetoViolence website are consistently on par with or above the DVP’s cdc.gov website which contains only static web pages. In 2014 and in 2015, the VetoViolence website received 3,909,850 page views, on average 325,821 per month, and 5,175,740 page views, on average 431,312 per month, respectively; whereas the DVP cdc.gov website received 3,604,040 page views, on average 300,337 per month, and 3,475,676 page views, on average 289,640 per month, respectively.

Conclusions:  Site metrics and user feedback highlight the value of the innovative, interactive online information VetoViolence provides:

• “This was a great tool and I appreciated that I could do it at my own pace and that it was free.”
• “Very good information - I hadn't considered violence as a public health issue.”
• “I applaud CDC for developing a training in an online format that clearly took a lot of time and energy to set up. It is visually appealing, stimulating, and different from typical 'government looking sites.”

Implications for research and/or practice:  VetoViolence, the unique offerings it provides, and the site’s relevance to DVP social media efforts underscore the importance of maintaining and developing engaging, interactive, useful resources—and making them available in real-time, for free, to the practitioners who need them most.