Instagram Campaign – Palliative Care – Care The Way It Should Be

Hello everyone!

We are this semester’s Kōkua Mau interns from the University of Hawai‘i West O‘ahu’s Public Administration Program with a concentration in Healthcare Administration. We are so excited to have this opportunity to work with Kōkua Mau and learn more about the necessary service of Palliative Care.

Our project goal is to answer the question, “Can social media be an effective tool in encouraging the public to seek more information on Palliative Care as an option for themselves or their loved ones?” Our Palliative Care, Care The Way It Should Be, public awareness campaign launches this week on Instagram. (See our Why Instagram? page)

We asked ourselves, how can we help bring Palliative Care out of the shadows and into the conversation. Since we had just come out of a communication campaign class, we wanted to apply what we learned to this tangible issue, and we outlined a project to utilize social media platforms to bring awareness and access to the public.

We researched different Palliative Care programs across the country and found that most are not using social media as a vehicle for public awareness, however, there are multitudes of different organizations successfully using social media for other public awareness campaigns.

In preparation for the social media campaign, we worked with the Kōkua Mau’s webmaster, to restructure the Kōkua Mau website in order to support the social media campaign that is easier for the general public to navigate. We researched the psychological and sociological barriers of healthcare awareness both nationwide and locally, outlined who the target demographics for Palliative Care awareness are, designed a pre-campaign survey to help us focus content creation, and set up data analytics within our social media platforms to track efficacy.

We then created Kōkua Mau’s first Instagram account, set up LinkTree for clickable links in bio, and sent out the initial survey for baseline data. We used vetted scholarly sources and leaders in the Palliative Care community to research effective language and messaging, as well as visuals like color pallets and imagery that appeal to the public, in order to create and design online content that is unbiased and informative. Lastly, we looked at best practices for content drops and post frequency.

The initial wave of the campaign will run for four weeks, starting at the end of September 2021 during this wave we ask you to let us know through DM or email, what you like, dislike, and for your feedback, so we can adjust the trajectory in real-time. We encourage you to follow us @Kokua.Mau and hope you will click like, share, and re-post our content on your accounts.

Thank you so much for your support and cooperation!

Below you find the live IG feed that get updated every time we post something. Please note that only pictures are shown in this feed. For videos and stories that are part of this campaign please follow us on Instagram.