As a once in a century pandemic ripped through the globe, the State of California raced to respond by building a statewide vaccination program designed to protect each and every resident across the state. Despite the breadth and depth of the program, significant hurdles persisted to vaccinate every resident. Misinformation about the safety of vaccines, confusion among the public, and lack of access to vaccinations were major hurdles.
Street Level Strategy has served as one of two outreach consulting firms for the California Department of Public Health’s Vaccinate All 58 program since June 2021. In this capacity, we lead all one-on-one outreach to hard-to-reach communities who are experiencing high rates of COVID transmission and low vaccination rates. These hard-to-reach communities are often low income and communities of color. Our team has utilized time tested community organizing tactics and cutting edge data analytics to identify, inform, and persuade individuals and families to get vaccinated. We have innovated the use of regression modeling to improve targeting and messaging in this program. Our modeling program utilizes the results of outreach as well as publicly available data on individual behaviors to create regression models that predict the persuadability of an individual on the question of receiving a vaccine. Moreover, we use the data we collected during outreach in real-time to test message strategies and develop predictive models that help us identify what messages would best with each target audience. Our outreach team is capable of speaking 7 languages (Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Hindi, and Korean) and is composed of individuals who reflect the communities they work with.
The ultimate deliverable for our work is measured by persuading and assisting individuals and families to receive COVID vaccines. To date, we have had conversations with over 3 million individuals and facilitated the scheduling of over 300,000 vaccination appointments.