The Voices on Vax Campaign: Lessons Learned from Engaging Youth to Promote COVID Vaccination.

Background: The Voices on Vax campaign was a collaborative effort that engaged youth to create an interactive website and social media presence to increase COVID vaccine confidence and uptake among African American families in Baltimore, Maryland.

Objectives: To describe lessons learned and offer recommendations for future health communication campaigns involving youth ambassadors and virtual platforms.

Methods: We collected website analytics and limited data from pop-up surveys on the Voices on Vax website, as well as reflections from the youth ambassadors about their experiences.

Lessons learned: Challenges included difficulties engaging the priority population and methodological limitations of our campaign's impact evaluation. Successes included our focus on youth and adaptive engagement strategies.

Conclusions: We recommend using techniques to maximize engagement by the priority population, conducting in-person outreach, incorporating mixed methods data collection, and providing a mix of structured training and creative freedom to youth ambassadors.