Project Spotlights
We help people across the social sector use social media and social strategies to get results they can measure. Over the years we’ve supported, and learned from, hundreds of people doing this work. Much of what we do happens behind the scenes. Below is a sampling of the organizations, teams and projects we’ve been glad to support. The credit for these projects belongs to the teams behind them, and we’re proud to have played a part in their work.
Upswell supported a data-driven social media campaign, built with 17 local organizations, to reduce COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among healthcare providers in six Nigerian states. An independent study found that it led to increased vaccination rates in the targeted states.
Upswell supported many of the 174 public health organizations that ran the more than 800 experiments in this paper. It also helped Meta set up and analyze many of the brand lift studies that measured each campaign's initial impact.
Upswell supported every stage of this project, from intervention design through implementation, including running Facebook and Instagram ads and monitoring and evaluation. Upswell also contributed to the final report.
A three-part Facebook campaign promoting COVID-19 vaccination in the US reached 25 million people, an average of 6.8 times each, between April and June 2021. Upswell provided technical support.
Upswell worked as an extension of the UNICEF Indonesia team throughout this campaign, supporting every part of it, from content strategy to measurement and evaluation. UNICEF has many talented people, and in our view this team in Indonesia is among its best.
Upswell supported this research team throughout the project. The researchers' use of mobile phone location data from Facebook users to measure the campaign's impact on the ground was their own work.
Upswell supported all aspects of this project, from helping lead and manage the creative team to running the social media ads. We also worked closely with Virtual Lab to set up monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for the project. Virtual Lab was an excellent partner.
Upswell supported all aspects of this campaign, from initial strategy development through implementation. Drew is a University of Washington alum, and he is proud of the team that made this project happen.
Upswell provided training, coaching, and ongoing support to Restart Partners and their team from the Communication Leadership Graduate Program at the University of Washington. Drew loved working with this team.
Billions of people around the world now turn to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media platforms for information and for contact with each other. As they do, the public health sector needs effective ways to use social media for social behavior change communication (SBCC). But the sector won't adopt social media for SBCC until it can measure what that work achieves. In this letter, published in Gates Open Research, we share a new approach to measuring and evaluating social media-based SBCC campaigns. We developed it as part of an iron-folic acid health intervention for young women in two states in northern India: Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
Upswell led this project, partnering with three organizations in India to create and deliver campaign content to women in northern India. It used rapid feedback on content tested on social media to improve the campaign as it ran.
Upswell helped the World Health Organization (WHO) use Facebook Live to reach people quickly during outbreaks of yellow fever, Zika and other diseases, and to get its followers, media outlets and partner organizations sharing accurate information in real time. It was one of several social media projects WHO ran during this period.
In 2019 Upswell helped PSI/Myanmar use Facebook’s communication tools to move government officials from general support for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to action on implementing it. PSI/Myanmar has provided health services to the people of Myanmar since 1995. It is one of the largest NGOs in the country and works in nearly all of Myanmar’s 330 townships. At the time of this project, its mission was to address the largest contributors to Myanmar’s burden of disease: HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, reproductive and maternal health, nutrition, diabetes, and hypertension.
Upswell worked with a cohort of nutrition organizations from 16 countries to build widespread support for breastfeeding.
Upswell teamed with NetHope to connect Puerto Ricans to each other and to critical resources after Hurricane Maria.
Upswell worked with Shatterproof and Facebook to help Americans struggling with the impacts of the opioid crisis.
On behalf of Facebook, Upswell trained and supported the social media team at the World Health Organization (WHO) in the run-up to World Mental Health Day 2016. Our training focused on creating content people could use to care for the people they love, and on actively managing comments and community. WHO’s team came up with the Black Dog post. No ad money was ever spent on it, and to date it has been viewed more than 100 million times. The content has also had an impact on the lives of many thousands of people living with depression.
Upswell worked with UNICEF and Facebook to help Brazilians protect themselves and their loved ones from Zika. It was the first time Facebook data was used to shape a public health campaign. Much of the credit goes to the team at UNICEF Brazil, and we still count it among the best examples we have seen of social media data used to protect lives.
