JMIR Form Res. 2022 Mar 12. doi: 10.2196/35764. Online ahead of print.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Latinos are among the most heavily impacted populations by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States due to intersectional barriers to care. Crowdsourcing open contests can be an effective means of community engagement but have not been well studied in Latino populations nor in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.
OBJECTIVE: 1) to implement and evaluate a crowdsourcing open contest to solicit a name for a COVID-19 social marketing campaign for Latinos in Maryland; and 2) to conduct a thematic analysis of submitted entries to guide campaign messaging.
METHODS: To assess the level of community engagement in this crowdsourcing open contest, we conducted descriptive statistics of entries and votes, and demographics of participants. Submitted text was analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.
RESULTS: We received 74 entries within a brief 2-week period. The top 10 entries were chosen by community judges and the winner was decided by popular vote. We received 383 votes within 1 week. The most common themes were collective efficacy, self-efficacy, and perceived benefits of COVID-19 testing. We used these themes to directly inform our social marketing intervention and found that ads based on these themes became the highest performing.
CONCLUSIONS: Crowdsourcing open contests are an effective means of community engagement and an agile tool for guiding interventions to address COVID-19, including in populations impacted by healthcare disparities such as Latino communities. Thematic analysis of contest entries can be a valuable strategy to inform the development of social marketing campaign materials.
PMID:35357317 | DOI:10.2196/35764
