Project Spotlight

Facebook Ads vs. Malaria: Using Social Media Campaigns to Promote Health-Seeking Behaviors of Households

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.

This project paired a social media campaign against malaria with a research study measuring how well it worked. We ran full-scale advertising campaigns on Facebook, and the study tracked outcomes through surveys of incentivized respondents. People who were shown the ads took more preventive action, and mosquito net use rose in certain subgroups. The study concluded that ad campaigns can change behavior, but that reaching particular subgroups may take more advanced targeting.

Case Study

More Project Spotlights

Social Media Messaging and Message Testing Campaign

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.

Facebook Powered M&E for Iron Folic Acid Health Interventions in Northern India

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.