Outbreak Week: A Viral Approach to Preparedness

Background: Infectious diseases are the third leading U.S. cause of death, also resulting in 15 million deaths worldwide each year. The Outbreaks: Protecting Americans from Infectious Diseases report by Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found major gaps in the country’s ability to prevent, control, and treat infectious disease outbreaks because of outdated systems and limited resources.

Methods: “Outbreak Week” was created as a moment in time to catalyze discussion within the public health community about whether we’re prepared as a nation to handle the next big outbreak. The effort aimed to engage the public health workforce with dynamic content and social media outreach. Content was developed with shareability in mind and included engaging stories, infographics, custom images designed for social media use, and a viral video. Dedicated outreach to targeted organizations and social media accounts provided rich distribution channels for the suite of content.

Results: Outbreak Week resulted in an 83% surge in NewPublicHealth.org (the Foundation's public health blog) traffic, 3,400 new Twitter followers of @RWJF_PubHealth and 47.6 million Twitter impressions. Other organizations joined the conversation using the hashtag #OutbreakWeek, adding their own data and stories in addition to sharing NewPublicHealth content.

Conclusion: This moment-in-time model serves as a case study for using an online campaign to spark interdisciplinary dialogue around an important issue. Presenters will discuss other examples of viral content and distribution tactics to promote public health issues. The lessons learned from these examples can be replicated and scaled to a variety of efforts and budgets based on available resources.