Evident’s “Wais” Campaign Wins Bronze Stevie For COVID-19 Communications

We’re proud to announce that our Healthy Pilipinas campaign bagged the 2020 Bronze Stevie Award for PR Campaign of the Year – COVID-19 Related Information. This is the second Stevie Evident has won this year, the first being our E-PESO campaign that won Gold. The Stevie Award for Women in Business honors women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run worldwide. The Stevies have been hailed as one of the world’s premier business awards.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a battle fought by our healthcare workers alone. Stopping the spread of the virus was everyone’s shared responsibility.

To support the Department of Health‘s efforts to keep Filipinos safe from COVID-19, BreakthroughACTION, USAID’s flagship programs for social and behavior change on Health, partnered with Evident to launch the “COVID Alis Sa Pamilyang Wais” (or “Family Smarts Keep COVID Away”) Campaign. Our campaign highlights the importance of the Filipino family and collective action in the fight against COVID-19. 

With the virus’ capability of infecting an entire community through just one patient, the campaign aimed to shift and sustain behaviors of Filipinos in practicing preventive measures against COVID-19. 

Changing the beliefs and behaviors of the public during the pandemic required developing an easily-accessible platform that the public could trust. Given this, we positioned the Healthy Pilipinas Facebook page (the DOH’s official social and behavior change communication platform) as a one-stop source for credible, digestible, and actionable information against COVID-19.

The information shared on the page was DOH-verified and was constantly updated to match new protocols set by the government. We made sure to regularly align with the DOH, especially at the start of the pandemic, as protocols on COVID-19 were different per country.

Throughout the partnership, we continuously fine-tuned our process and content based on the latest updates from DOH. Our Data and Insights team also worked tirelessly to produce weekly news and social media scans. DOH and their partners used the information and data our team gathered to strategize on how to further protect the public from COVID-19.

Along with being credible, it was also important for the page’s content to be friendly and relatable to the families that we wanted to inform and empower. “Discussing COVID-19 may be a serious topic, but we still wanted the audience to stay engaged and optimistic for them to truly practice preventive measures,” says Abigail de Vera, our Art Director for this campaign. “This is why we decided to create hand-drawn illustrations with photos of people—to keep the overall visual lighthearted and eye-catching in social media feeds full of other COVID-related news and information.”

Healthy Pilipinas contained both educational and gamified posts to boost engagement and educate the public.

Our “COVID Alis Sa Pamilyang Wais” campaign, with its new art direction and up-to-date content, grew the Healthy Pilipinas Facebook page’s following by 82% (or 39,000 new fans) within the first month. But the effectiveness and success of our work did not end with this one campaign.

Breakthrough ACTION, USAID’s flagship program for social and behavior change, featured the campaign in its network of over 21 member countries as a best practice. Along with that, the campaign’s message of positioning the family as the first line of defense against COVID-19 was shared by media, non-government, government, and corporate organizations.

The campaign was further given life as our friendly messaging was adopted by the DOH in their non-COVID-19 campaigns. “Our campaign paved the way for the DOH to communicate and promote preventive measures against COVID-19 in a fun and conversational manner that is more accessible to the public,” says Paolo Balderia, our Project Manager for this campaign. “This served as a springboard for the DOH to develop friendlier messaging with the adoption of the ‘Wais’ idea for their other health and wellness campaigns.”

The “Wais” concept was adopted by the DOH for their other health and wellness campaigns.

With the information from the BreakthroughACTION team serving as our foundation, we came up with strong, strategic insights that led to creative and actionable content, enabling our campaign to successfully create Wais Families in every home.

Learn more about the project by watching our case study video below.