Preventing in Synch: Coordinated Social Media Message Pushes and Outreach for Youth Violence Prevention

Background:  To unite professionals working in the field of youth violence prevention, the STRYVE Action Council pulls together national, multi-sector organizations that serve at the national and state-level to prevent youth violence before it starts. The Council aims to raise awareness that youth violence is a preventable public health issue, expand the network of organizations that are involved in youth violence prevention, and to inform policies that advance strategies to prevent youth violence.

Program background:  To increase the quantity, reach, and engagement of youth violence messaging, the STRYVE Action council provides coordinated social media content across Council organizations and other partners for areas of heightened national attention around youth violence. The provided content includes graphics, branded images and messaging that can be disseminated across various social media platforms. Additional informational outreach to communication staff has been conducted to raise awareness about the STRYVE Action Council’s goals and available coordination and messaging opportunities.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  Using the Sysomos MAP, social media measuring tool, each coordinated message push is measured for potential reach, most popular messages, and key influencers who are using the designated #STRYVE hashtag. The metrics show increased online conversations around youth violence prevention during these dedicated times for coordinated message pushes. For example, during the recent outreach for National Mentoring Month, the Council’s message push resulted in 233 Tweets, leading to more than a million estimated impressions on Twitter. The Council will also track ongoing messaging outside of designated message pushes and work to increase ongoing conversations on youth violence prevention.

Conclusions:  A limitation for quality, science-based content sharing can often be the inability of many programs to develop, distribute, and interact with quality messaging on their own either through lack of time, support, or communications resources. By providing content to a variety of types of youth violence prevention organizations, we can be assured to reach audiences at all levels. Knowing that imaged-based content extends reach and visibility in an often crowded social media environment, we have used collaborations, relationships, and metrics to make decisions to enhance quality of distributed content. This message outreach and partnership system is a developing practice, where a community of prevention professionals are working toward increasing the online prevention conversations with credible, science-based content.

Implications for research and/or practice:  To meet our goals of informing organizations, raising awareness, and expanding networks, the STRYVE Action Council hopes to create a model of communications message dissemination where appropriate communications are shared widely and at the right times. By activating Council organizations and state and local-level partners to a higher level of collaboration, we can expand the reach of credible, science-based content. But, beyond simply creating content, partnerships will require to be developed and maintained. Through this regular system of creating and disseminating messaging, the Council aims to increase the execution of communications initiatives, and increase the capacity to raise the visibility of youth violence as a significant, preventable public health issue.