LEVERAGING DIGITAL TOOLS TO SPARK INTEREST IN SELF-INJECT CONTRACEPTION: RESULTS FROM DISC’S PARTNERSHIP WITH META IN NIGERIA

Delivering Innovation in Self-Care (DISC) is a five-year project funded by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation implemented by Population Services International in Uganda and Malawi, as well as in Nigeria (in partnership with the Society for Family Health – Nigeria).  DISC aims to give women an opportunity to understand, adopt, and continue to use the highly effective self-inject contraceptive product DMPA-SC. We do so via a multichannel promotion campaign known as Discover Your Power (DYP). The campaign promotes self-injection (SI) with community engagements and social media content to drive traffic to DISC’s website and chatbot.

In Nigeria, DISC partnered with Facebook to conduct a campaign between August 2022 and October 2022. DISC leveraged Facebook ad credit support to promote online content aimed at raising awareness of DMPA-SC self-injection and its unique advantages as a contraceptive, that also sought to increase women’s sense of self-efficacy to self-inject.  Our specific target population was women ages 18-39 across 15 Nigerian States. We used a variety of metrics to measure our impact and assess audience perspectives.

Digital engagement complements in-person community mobilization efforts that also galvanize women’s interest in learning more about, and potentially trying out, self-inject. Ultimately, the impact of our campaign is measured in terms of increased numbers of self-inject visits at the health clinics to which we are sign-posting women.

Highlights from the campaign from August-October 2022 include:

• More than 5.9 million people within the target population saw our ads across the states where the campaign was active
• There were 1.2 million link-clicks to the Nigeria DYP website and chatbot during the campaign.
• Registered 121K website page views, 390K chat bot initiations, and 1.7K call centre calls, representing a significant uptick over the prior months.

Read on to learn more.

RAISING AWARENESS AND INCREASING SELF-EFFICACY TO SELF-INJECT

The overall objectives for DISC’s SI campaign are two-fold:

1) Raise awareness and interest in SI, measured in terms of clicks-through to our website, which offers in-depth information on SI and resources to access FP services, including a chatbot, call centre, and clinic locator.

2) Reengage users who have shown interest in our content. Ads are aimed at increasing users’ sense of self-efficacy to self-inject by building relevance of SI over time with continued nudges for action.

In partnership with Meta, we developed two sequential campaigns (running from August-September and September-October, respectively). The first campaign focused on increasing the audience’ knowledge of SI (specifically its three-month duration, suitability for youth, and reversibility), whereas the second campaign sought to impact women’s sense of self-efficacy to use SI. For campaign one, we ran 20 ads including stills, videos, testimonials, and influencer videos. Campaign two used similar formats and tactics but had a slightly higher number of ads (23).

We sought to deliver against our objectives by using Facebook dark ads (which don’t appear on the business page feed) and boosted page posts targeting women ages 18-39. In between campaign one and two, we paused to run A/B testing comparing still and video creatives to determine comparative performance. The A/B test revealed that video creatives were more cost effective than still creatives at driving traffic, with a $0.06 cost per result versus a $0.08 cost for still creatives.

CAMPAIGN RESULTS

Both campaigns sought to increase click-throughs to our website and chatbot, and calls to our call centre. This effort succeeded, as we registered 121K website page views during the campaign period, 390K chat bot initiations, and 1.8K call centre conversations—all of which demonstrated a major increase over the prior period (see graphs below)