COVID-19.

Misinformation is catching.

Nostalgia quickly turns to contempt. We fear the unknown. Our relationship with risk is skewed. Joe Rogan has had far more impact on our lives than anticipated.

And we learned that Wombats have square poop.

COVID taught us things about ourselves and our neighbors. Mostly, not great things. As a society, we aren’t very good at math. Or kindness. That having access to all the information in the world comes with tremendous downsides. That as a country we are still pretty resilient.

Like many agencies with our skillset, we suddenly found ourselves in 2020 across multiple contracts doing significant work in the vaccine and public health space, all asking the question, “What is the path from hesitancy to acceptance?”

GODOT.

Trauma-informed messaging directly from the community.

Vaccine messaging is a last-mile problem. The Come To My Window project allowed queer and allied voices to tell their own stories about the complicated calculus of choosing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Driven by a first-of-its-kind survey tracking LGBTQ vaccine hesitancy across Colorado’s front range, we reached our social media audience cocktail an average of 2.12 times with a cost per click of $0.42.

You can view the project here, in its late-2020 state, and some press from the NY Times.

Here’s the thing about Earl.

In this interactive, the audience takes part in a conversation with their ornery Cousin Earl. He asks a question, you choose which critter has the best response, and you are scored on empathy, influence, and facts.

By putting the user in the third person, we lift some of the discussion’s emotional weight. And if they happen to be vaccine hesitant themselves? Hopefully, they feel more open and less attacked.

Play the game here.

Work in progress.

Godot is currently in a long-term engagement with Boulder County Public Health driving vaccine awareness for parents of younger children. Over the course of 2022, we ran a series of focus groups exploring hesitancy in our communities. We broke our findings down into three foundational themes: Fear of the Unknown, Community Ecosystem, and Ambivalence.

This campaign is currently in continued development, and as soon as our findings are public we will share them here (as well as in newspapers, television, and on the sides of buses and buildings).

You can read the initial findings here.

Defining hesitancy.

Vaccine hesitancy is not binary.

In a series of design sessions, we developed a spectrum to help us better discuss the participants’ headspace. By design, we targeted participants whom we felt would fall into the “hesitant” category, which, notably, includes many people who are, in fact, vaccinated and have their children vaccinated.

Theme One: Understanding the Unknown.

This approach focuses on the unknown and how science interprets and communicates evidence, risk, and reward. It explores the difference between evidence and proof, the relationship between scale and experience, and the dissonance between trust in process versus faith in the individual.

Theme Two: The Community Ecosystem.

When we watch TV commercials, we are often drawn in by that Super Bowl spot that leans into the absurd. Culturally, we’ve reached a point where having a talking gecko sell us car insurance is considered completely normal. Handsome guy on a horse on a boat selling us body wash? Sure.

Here, we explore how nature doesn’t just think about itself.

Theme Three: Ambivalence and The Tipping Point.

Aesthetics are still a driving, gut-level force in how people ingest information. We connect symmetry to balanced decision making, color palette to care and purpose, detail to quality of product. Sometimes it’s used for good, sometimes it’s used for evil, but it’s universal.

In this approach, Godot explored the role of pure aesthetics set against the idea of learning lessons through fables.