Implementing a co-design approach to facilitate a COVID-19 vaccination rapid response

Local organizational collaborations and "community-ready information" are central elements of enacting "meaningful community engagement." Academic partnerships with health departments and community organizations can practice co-design, even during emergencies such as the global COVID-19 pandemic. Co-design is a method to include multiple perspectives, build trust, and share resources and power with community organizations and members.

The University of Maryland Prevention Research Center and Horowitz Center for Health Literacy activated established relationships with a national network of organizations serving LGBTQ+ populations and a state network of local health improvement coalitions to support COVID-19 vaccination messaging and behavioral nudges in plain language and primary languages. This paper describes the co-design process and customized COVID-19 vaccination products for the partners.

The process helped to build partner communication capacity and rapidly develop customized COVID-19 vaccination products for partner networks. We sustained relationships with both partner networks and actively worked together on developing messages and materials during the project's 12 months. Partner organizations reported high satisfaction with the co-design process and a wide range of communication materials with many unique nudges.

Our project contributes to the public health co-design literature in 2 ways. Our project had robust evaluation throughout, which responds to the call for more evaluation of co-design effectiveness. We also show the combined usefulness of communication expertise and co-design, even under emergency conditions. Co-designing communication products can be time-consuming, but we were able to iterate, collect and apply feedback, and respond to partner requests on short notice. The communication expertise of the academic team allowed the communication material and nudge development to be high-quality and well-tailored for the intended audiences. Our project suggests that a well-executed co-design project should be paired with a robust, ongoing dissemination and staffing infrastructure to ensure products reach into communities.