Artists Against an #Infodemic

Artists Against an #Infodemic: A visual health information campaign

Seven Things we learned leveraging the power of visuals to fight misinformation in 2020

By Elodie Mailliet Storm, Peter di Campo, Benjamin Petit, Erica Garber, Pamela Chen and Jenell Stewart.

It was early April and we were still stunned. It had just been a few weeks and we had all been losing sleep trying to understand how we got to the point where hotspots around the world had overflowing hospitals and most non-essential activities got shut down. Our kids were home. We were working remotely or were called to serve as essential workers. Stores were running out of toilet paper and bleach. Streets were empty. We knew very little about how the virus spread and were swimming in conflicting information. The first orders to not wear masks just got reversed. 

How would we make sure that the public not only would get the information it needed to stay safe but also would engage and trust that information that could save their lives? 

Because we had all previously worked together in some fashion and knew each other well, the idea came together very quickly as did the timeline for execution, which was so helpful.

But despite this initial familiarity and ease, along the way we learned some surprising and invaluable lessons about collaboration, the value of visuals in information campaigns and community engagement. 

Flip through the full report of the project

Here are the seven key learnings

• Speed is key but narrowing down the long lasting messaging is more important

The sense of urgency and responsibility our three organizations felt was overwhelming. There was so much need for information that could save lives and we needed to go fast but also needed to make sure that we would provide both meaningful and accurate information, which required us to think carefully and slow down at times. We decided to issue a proper call for entry for art and review applications. We spent a fair amount of time on design of the public campaigns. As we were going through these steps, we worried that the information we provided would become outdated or irrelevant. We always worried that we were not going fast enough. Sadly the reality of this virus proved us wrong. Six months after we started, all of the health messages we drafted early in the crisis are now more relevant than before. It is more important to focus on relevant and accurate messages than speed of delivery, although speed matters.

In addition, the week prior to launching the health information campaign, George Floyd was murdered leading to worldwide protests against racism and police brutality. We unanimously felt that we had to use this opportunity to also address racism as a major public health crisis. We decided to add two more designs addressing this issue to our campaign. Again, we feared not being fast enough. Again, these messages are proving as relevant now as when we drafted them. 

• Prioritize the message

While seemingly validating the sources of the information displayed, logos proved to be distracting for audiences who mistook them for advertising. Avoid logos in public art. 

• Photography as a shared language

While historically health and government organizations have used illustrations to engage communities around health messages, most audiences responded more strongly to the photography associated with captions as a human shared experience and a way to ground the health messages in reality. In physical spaces,viewers tended to gravitate to the caption of the photograph. And in social media, photography performed better than illustration on all accounts: Everyday, CatchLight and Dysturb.

• Adapt the content to your community

We need to be spending just as much time planning the communication of recommendations as we do generating them. Public health messages and policy should not be dictated by the loudest voices, and to fight an infodemic you have to find creative and targeted ways to reach people.

Global content resonated well in multiple small towns in the US because it helped people feel connected to a much larger issue and community.

However, global images and captions totally missed the point in certain locations like Kenya where many public health messages come from outside sources and there was a clear need for locally generated content.

One of the paste-ups shared in the Kangemi area of Nairobi depicted an elderly white Italian woman making Easter cookies. The caption explained how the photographer was concerned for his aging parents during the crisis. Although 70% of Kenyan’s are Christian and celebrate Easter, comments by passersby reflected that they did not see themselves reflected in the image. Race is the most likely reason for this disconnect, as the woman in the image is white and the majority of residents in the area are black. The artwork lasted four days before being torn down. Passersby suggested the image and the story should be local, and depict a more familiar frame of reference. 

In Mathare, another area of Nairobi, we commissioned an artist to create an original mural. The artist, Msale, is well known and respected in the area. He integrated some of the international paste-up messaging into his original, painted designs. He also invited area youth to help him in creating the work. Msale’s hyper-local content and collaborative approach was far more successful.

• Make learning fun

There was no way of knowing the degree to which our health care messaging was getting across and what our diverse, global audience’s baseline knowledge of COVID-19 prevention was. We posted our photography and health care illustrations, but were they effective?

To make our content more interactive for the audience, we designed a series of IG Stories with trivia questions. We asked questions including “Can young people spread COVID-19 to other people even if they have mild or no symptoms?” and “Being able to hold your breath for 10 seconds or more without coughing or feeling discomfort means you are free from COVID-19, True or False?” – relatively basic questions which, thankfully, most people answered correctly.

Quiz questions were generally designed to be obvious and function primarily as reminders – for example, the question “Which one of the following best illustrates how to wear a mask correctly?” was written over two illustrations, including one in which the person is very obviously not wearing the mask over his nose. 98% of people answered that correctly.

However, it is of note that for the question “Wearing a cloth mask protects you more than the people around you” with a True/False option (and similarly, reworded questions designed to make the same point), 23% of people answered incorrectly. This signals that many people believe they should wear a mask to protect themselves, not knowing that we should actually all wear masks to protect each other.

The quiz posts performed particularly well – they were on par with average view for IG Stories on the @everydayafrica and @everydayeverywhere accounts, but with a much higher interaction rate: out of 16,900 viewers, 10,100 of them “took the quiz”. 

Overall regarding social, we learned that, for the @everydayafrica and @everydayeverywhere accounts, engagement is higher on IG Stories than on the Instagram feed, and that our audience responds more to photography than illustration.

• The keys to managing a successful collaboration

Define the roles and clear expectations early. Allow for regular scheduled meetings. Make sure that work gets done between meetings and not at the meeting. One organization needs to take ownership of the project management -not always the easiest of roles. Would highly recommend first reading the Collaborative Journalism handbook by Heather Bryant of Project Facet and/ or taking a workshop before or as you launch your collaboration to establish best practices and ground rules.

Disagreements (on content, methodology, deployment approaches) are normal and part of the process. Figure out ahead of time how you will deal with disagreements. If the majority is to win, you just have to rally to the majority decision even if certain individuals or organizations are still in disagreement so as to not break the trust. Trust is more important to collaboration than anything else and needs to stay intact at all times. Again an insight garnered from Heather Bryant’s guide to collaboration.

• The key ingredients to replicability

Some aspects of this campaign could be easily replicated for a range of social issues. For example, the method of pairing photography with a health message to personalize how people are integrating a health guideline into their daily lives can be easily adapted to a variety of scenarios. At the conclusion of the campaign, several aspects of the project emerge as essential for future replication: 

• Community based approach: listen to communities to understand information needs and best way to deliver them: local vs international approach and content
• Artwork that is so creatively compelling it will attract and hold the audience’s attention. 
• Sizable digital network with whom to share and test content.
• Health message advisor to ensure calls to action are appropriate and clear. 
• Graphic designer to brand content so that online and offline content is visually unified.
• Area experts who understand needs in their geographic area and the audiences of paste-up locations.
• Digital media strategist to suss out how to distribute content effectively.
• Enough racial, age, religious, geographic, and gender variety depicted in the visuals that the audience can see themselves reflected in the images in some way.