Biography
Biography: Amanda J Rodriguez
Abstract
Background: Few HIV awareness, prevention and testing campaigns for youth have been rigorously and accurately developed, implemented and evaluated despite their experiencing sexual health disparities in accordance with CDC findings. The NMAC Youth Leadership Development program assessed the need for this and developed a web-based social media campaign geared towards this target population through various dispersed U.S. regions. Methods: The NMAC Youth Program participants volunteered to create this campaign starting with 2 core members, and later increasing to 4 core and 4 support members, from different US territories, with the focus group being youth aged 13-25. The selected platform was social networking sites due to the distance between the members and the utilization demonstrated by statistical findings from the Pew Research Center’s reports. The hashtag was evaluated beforehand to ensure exclusivity of use. Various social media accounts were created associated to the campaign for dissemination purposes. The official launch was during the 2015 USCA conferences held in Washington, D.C. in a youth led seminar facilitated by NMAC. The attending public was encouraged to participate in said campaign through videos, pictures and hash tag utilization throughout the conference. Materials were created to enable simple participation such as a banner with the logo and hash tag, as well as promotional shirts for the youth scholars to use. Reports on views, likes, comments and shares were consistently created and evaluated to ensure project success and accountability. An official pilot video has been developed, but has yet to be launched. Various individual videos from other scholars were filmed and edited to be made public through our social media sites, so that those persons may then share from our pages. This ensures continued interest and support of the campaign, as well as traffic for our pages. Results: According to Hash Tracking reports created by our dissemination team, by the end of the USCA conferences, there were a total of 240,000 unique timeline deliveries for content regarding the campaign on Twitter. Among those, 40,000 views were through clicks and opening photos. Instagram had a total of 18,050 impressions which account for timeline views from likes, comments and others. Of those, 13,676 views were from individuals seeing photos via the hash tag (#My60Sec). Conclusions: The reports demonstrate the efficacy of the youth led and geared Internet-based social media campaign to impact the testing availability and awareness of simplicity of prevention of HIV through menial daily tasks among young adults. Further implementation is required and ready to ensure continued interest and support, and will be monitored on a monthly basis.