Engaging Diverse Audiences
Engaging Diverse Audiences
This roadmap provides tools, strategies, recommendations, and fundamentals for working with diverse communities. Health departments, community-based organizations (CBOs), providers, and community health workers/promotores can use these resources for internal capacity building and developing outreach materials.
How Can My Organization Better Engage Diverse Communities?
Vaccine outreach is more successful when the audience connects with the messaging. However, audiences can be composed of people of varying cultures, ages, abilities, and identities. Creating outreach materials and implementing programs that resonate with diverse communities should be done thoughtfully. The resources in this roadmap aim to provide strategies and tools to tailor communications and outreach, center cultural humility, and elevate community voices.
For more information on why tailoring outreach for diverse audiences is important, see the Health Equity Roadmap.
Interventions to improve vaccine acceptance must acknowledge the lived experience of the audience, including those who have been historically underserved. These resources provide general strategies to build trust and vaccine confidence through tailored communications and outreach.
Groups that have been historically underserved have diverse cultural and linguistic identities and experiences. Cultural humility involves a life-long commitment to self-critique about differences in culture and a commitment to be aware of and actively mitigate power imbalances between cultures (Key Equity Terms and Concepts). When addressing the cultural context and linguistic needs within communities, it is essential to tailor efforts and programs to their intended population. These resources provide cultural humility tools and principles and guidance for providing linguistically appropriate care and outreach.
Uplifting voices of communities impacted by health disparities can be a strategy to promote vaccine equity. These resources provide examples and principles of strengthening community connections and engaging people with lived experience to support vaccination efforts for diverse communities.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of vaccination outreach campaigns, many of which engaged diverse communities. Resources in this section highlight reflections and lessons learned from these campaigns.
What are Considerations When Developing Outreach for Specific Audiences?
The first section of this roadmap covered general guidance for tailoring messaging and engaging diverse audiences. This section provides considerations for tailoring materials to specific communities or populations. Please let us know if there are additional communities that you would like guidance on how to best serve!
LGBTQIA2S+ is an abbreviation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Two-Spirit, and more.
