Chapter 2: Raise Awareness and Begin Outreach
Build your community’s trust by providing fact-based communications and keeping them informed throughout the process.
Keep accessibility and ethical use in mind.
While meeting the urgency of the moment, be sure to consider existing disparities and avoid creating new ones. Your outreach program should meet accessibility standards and be offered in multiple languages in order to reach all candidates.
The rollout of COVID-19 vaccination efforts highlights the importance of ethical use of technology. When it comes to individual and community safety, the concern goes beyond ensuring adequate supply or appropriate scheduling tools. We now have to look at how to enable wider access to technology to schedule vaccination appointments as well as how to ensure equitable distribution of the vaccine to underserved communities. Review Salesforce’s lessons from the field as you consider rolling out your own vaccine management program.
Engage on any channel.
Once you’ve established your process and have your technology platform up and running, you’ll need to get the word out to your candidates about vaccine availability and distribution. To reach as many people as possible, you should devise a multichannel communications strategy.
But don’t expect those communications to be one-sided. Be prepared to engage with the public across digital channels. They will have many questions, and in order to build trust, it’s critical that you answer their concerns. Responding quickly to specific individuals or broadcasting messages to large audiences can all be done easily with a single platform that can deliver across multiple engagement channels, such as social media, email, your website, and SMS.
Your platform should also be able to automate bespoke journeys for each individual, offering the right message at the right time on the right channel at scale. Digital knowledge portals and chatbots acting as digital assistants can help reduce call center volumes by quickly providing answers to common questions before routing recipients to service representatives. Of course, not everyone has access to digital channels, so it’s important to amplify your message using traditional media that includes print, radio, and television.
Communicate new information as it arises.
Trust amplifies vaccine demand.
Lake County Health Department in northern Illinois implemented its AllVax portal, an online vaccine registration and orchestration system, in just eight weeks. Built on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform for Government, it guides individuals through the vaccination process step by step.
People seeking the vaccine create a profile in the system and can get answers to frequently asked questions. When they are eligible for the vaccines, Marketing Cloud enables alerts, and they can log back in to schedule an appointment. They can also opt in to receive important communications at various checkpoints throughout their vaccination journey. The platform connects to state and federal systems to report information such as adverse events. The health department team can also monitor metrics such as the percentage of the community that is vaccinated and equitable distribution goals.
Lake County has more than 700,000 residents and regularly welcomes many more commuters and tourists. When AllVax launched, more than 200,000 people quickly registered. “We see that as a sign that people feel safe and trust our ability to handle the logistics,” said Jefferson McMillan-Wilhoit, Director of Health Informatics and Technology at the health department.
Next: Chapter 3: Administer Vaccines
- Track inventory to effectively administer vaccination program
- Schedule vaccination appointments with ease
- Manage outreach to coordinate follow-up visits