A5.01 - Oral: Protecting Your Environment Inside and Out: A New Strategy for Youth Vaping Prevention and Education

Brief Abstract Summary: In this presentation, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center team, will provide guidance on creating health education campaigns for LGBTQIA+ youth, ages 14-21. We will discuss our new approaches to educating youth on the issue of vaping, how to quit, and industry targeting. Moving away from traditional messaging focused on physical health, we focused on issues that are more relevant to Gen Z, including the environmental impacts of the vaping industry and mental health impacts of vaping. The Center developed a health education campaign with a local media company, and launched it across multiple social media platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, and Spotify. In our presentation, we will discuss the entire process of developing our health education campaign from concept to development of content to adjustments throughout the campaign period to analysis of the results. We will also share lessons learned and how we will use them to improve our health communications moving forward.

Detailed abstract description: Having conversations with LGBTQIA+ youth about the importance of vaping and smoking cessation can sometimes be difficult as vaping is so ingrained in modern culture and technology is changing every single day. The methods in which younger people are receiving and processing information are changing constantly and rapidly making it incredibly difficult to pinpoint the best mode of communication to reach youth with health education campaigns.
The Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center has traditionally used printed materials to spread our vaping and smoking cessation campaigns at our outreach events, including local community events such as Prides as well as outreach directly in schools. Through these community outreach events, our team saw a disconnect with younger community members, and our more traditional methods of disseminating health education materials. Our center strives to make sure that our health promotion materials are reaching all members of the LGBTQIA+ community that we serve, which prompted us to contemplate how our information is being received and how we can increase our reach to those younger populations throughout the community. As a team, we decided that utilizing the vast reach of social media to target the LGBTQIA+ youth was an avenue that we wanted to explore.
Our team will explore the process of updating our health promotion materials in collaboration with a local media company to spread the reach of our vaping and smoking cessation materials through multiple social media platforms. We will discuss how we decided which social media platforms to use and which would be most effective for our target audience. We will also discuss how we worked as a team to develop eye catching and engaging materials about the environmental impacts of the vaping industry and mental health impacts of vaping that would be used as targeted advertisements. These ads generated clickable links, which led users to our website for more information about vaping and smoking cessation resources.
Overall our presentation will discuss the process of working with a media company to promote our health education materials through social media and how this helped the success of our campaign. Both projected and actual figures from the various media platforms used in the campaign will be shared to highlight which social media platforms generated the most engagement and which graphics performed the best overall with LGBTQIA+ Gen Z youth. In conclusion, we will share lessons learned and how we plan on using the results of this health education campaign in our future work.