The Voices on Vax Campaign: Lessons Learned from Engaging Youth to Promote COVID Vaccination

Background: The Voices on Vax campaign was a collabor ative effort that engaged youth to create an interactive website and social media presence to increase COVID vaccine confidence and uptake among African American families in Baltimore, Maryland. Objectives: To describe lessons learned and offer recom-mendations for future health communication campaigns involving youth ambassadors and virtual platforms. Methods: We collected website analytics and limited data from pop-up surveys on the Voices on Vax website, as well as reflections from the youth ambassadors about their experiences. Lessons Learned: Challenges included difficulties engaging the priority population and methodological limitations of our campaign’s impact evaluation. Successes included our focus on youth and adaptive engagement strategies. Conclusions: We recommend using techniques to maximize engagement by the priority population, conducting in-person outreach, incorporating mixed methods data collection, and providing a mix of structured training and creative freedom to youth ambassadors.