Dear public health colleagues,

The College of Public Health will be developing an evidence-based social media awareness campaign around COVID-19. We hope to create enough material to be able to send a new message each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the foreseeable future until it is no longer relevant.

We are inviting everyone in the college (faculty, staff, students) to contribute to this campaign by sending in messages! Messages should be:

• Paraphrased from an evidence–based source: peer reviewed publications, or newspapers such as the NYT, Washington Post, the Guardian etc. (and we ask that you also include the exact quote that you paraphrased)
• Short, no more than 250 characters
• Written in a way to tackle one of the below concepts

Messages should also be framed in such a way to target one of the following critical health communication concepts:
• Perceived susceptibility: one’s belief about their chance of getting a condition
• Perceived severity: ones’ belief about how serious the consequences of their getting the condition might be
• Self-efficacy: one’s confidence in their ability to carry out/implement the suggested actions/behavior
• Response efficacy: one’s beliefs that if they do carry out the recommended actions, their susceptibility and/or severity will decrease.

Here’s an example of a message to help guide your thinking:
Are you between the ages of 20-54? YOU are at risk for #COVID-19. It IS serious for YOU. 38% of hospitalized patients were in this age group. You CAN prevent by #SocialDistancing #StayHome #DoYourPart #PublicHealthActs (or some other creative hashtag)

Source: New York Times
Concepts: Perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, self-efficacy.

The CPH Communications team will work your messages into shareable social media graphics and we are currently working on creating a template so there will be visual consistency. We also working on a creative hashtag for these messages so they will all be easily identifiable as part of this campaign.

We have set up a shared document where you can submit your suggestions directly!

We’d like to start this campaign as soon as possible but need at least ten messages before we can do so. So please send them in and keep them coming over the next few weeks as you read/hear about new data/studies/etc.

If you have questions, please contact Dr. Rima Afifi rima-afifi@uiowa.edu

We look forward to reading your messages!