Revisiting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services COVID-19 Public Education Media Campaign: Successes and New Lessons Learned

Abstract

Communication professionals in Federal agencies must have a seat at their agency’s budget formulation table – to inform the budget process from the beginning and to advise on funding for the communications required to achieve program goals. This is one of nine lessons learned from US Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) systems change efforts that were applied to help create the “We Can Do This” COVID-19 Public Education Media Campaign (Campaign), and these lessons were presented in a 2022 Journal of Health Communication article. Now that substantial evaluation data are available in eight recent research articles to verify the Campaign’s success, this lesson can be revisited to identify more specific ways in which it can be applied, along with two additional lessons identified from the Campaign implementation. In light of the Campaign’s success, these learnings all can contribute to creating a new framework for guiding quality USDHHS health communication activities in the future – inspired also by four previously-published communication frameworks. The new framework can then be used to build an enhanced structure within USDHHS to handle future public education media campaigns and other communication activities, a matter of particular urgency given the likelihood of a future public health and humanitarian crisis requiring rapid and effective communication responses.