Were you delivering this service to young people before the COVID-19 crisis?
Our website was delivering this tech-based service to young people before the COVID-19 crisis to equip adolescents with the information and motivation they needed to make informed choices on their sexual and reproductive health. This was done through social features and content designed to engage users rather than to lecture them. We adapted content from recognized global standards in sexuality education, including stories that we translated for local audiences to ensure relevance and improved engagement.
What new approaches did you use to respond to the barriers created by the COVID-19 pandemic to reach young people?
Provision of personalized, reliable information on COVID-19: Initially, we focused on generic content that was published across all the seven-country platforms. However, after the COVID-19 pandemic, we started encouraging countries to publish content that is specific to their territories and also share interventions that are happening on a national level. We encouraged teams to use a holistic approach to develop content, whereby editors and moderators would be expected to promote content that already existed on the official UNFPA country websites whilst ensuring that they broadened their scope to provide as much factual content to users as possible.
This content would then be shared on social media platforms with links back to the TuneMe platform, through a process that would keep users engaged. To do this, our moderators and editors worked closely with the UNFPA in-country communications focal persons. UNFPA country offices were also challenged to publicize the TuneMe platform and ensure that their communications focal persons shared the content on their official social media platforms.
We added “Coronavirus and You” to our content menu to share information on COVID-19, including advice on prevention and facts to counter misconceptions. We then built this section up to incorporate content on access to reproductive health services, menstrual health management, and gender-based violence in relation to COVID-19. In this section, we explored self-care content and offered advice on adolescent rights and how to get help should a user need to report a violation of rights.
To amplify this content on COVID-19, countries were encouraged to incorporate local content and the experiences of young people in their responses to the pandemic. An associated campaign was conceptualized by the Safeguard Young People (SYP) program. They created the #YouthandCOVID19 Diaries campaign, which we co-published on the TuneMe platform.
Why did you decide to use these approaches?
We realized that a lot of adolescents and young people relied on technology to access information and we wanted to position TuneMe as their go-to platform for this, while also keeping our existing users engaged with updates on COVID-19 and SRHR. Based on the information shared by young people through the #YouthandCOVID19 diaries, we realized that they spent most of their time online and as such consumed a lot of digital media content. Some of them expressed the need for accurate content on COVID-19, as they served as caretakers for family members and advocates for change in their communities. Users were able to access TuneMe through the internet browsers on their mobile phones or through Facebook’s Internet.org platform. TuneMe was also available on Free Basics which allowed any young person with a mobile phone to access the platform without the limitation of data or Wi-Fi connectivity.
How are you working to find out if these approaches are having the desired impact?
We rely on Google Analytics to ascertain whether or not our approaches are working. In addition, we monitor the engagement of users on the platform itself. Between the launch of “Coronavirus and You” on TuneMe in April 2020 and December 2020, we have had a total of 11,866 views of the content across the country pages.
