Help Raise Vaccination Rates in Fort Wayne

Journal Gazette: Fort Wayne native wants to talk vaccines 

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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Nathan and I'm from Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's a place I care a lot about, especially the people who live there. That includes most of my family, and a lot of great friends. And I think because of that, no matter where else I've lived, Fort Wayne has always felt like home.

 

In fact, for all of last year, even though I was in Los Angeles, I kept a closer eye on Covid case numbers in Allen County than even my own neighborhood. Until one day...

 

NBC News: "The unrelenting virus may have met its match. Pfizer now says its vaccine is ninety-five percent effective, and safe."

 

But it turns out, effective vaccines can only end a pandemic if enough people take them. And in Northeast Indiana, there's still a long way to go.

 

I've spent much of this past year trying think about what I could do to help change that. My professional background is in entertainment, marketing and communications, and education, and I've been especially interested in all the public messaging that's been used to try to get people to take the vaccine.

 

All the research says the best way to convince an unvaccinated person to take the vaccine is through conversations with family or friends. In fact, of all the people who were hesitant or even resistant to getting vaccinated at the beginning of this year, more than forty percent of them are now fully vaccinated, and thirty-six percent of those people say it was a conversation with someone they know that changed their mind.

 

And yet even today, eighteen months into the pandemic, there have been no initiatives targeting vaccinated people to encourage and equip them to have these conversations that we know can be so effective at increasing a community's vaccination rate. That's what I'm here to change.

 

So what does that look like? After talking with local medical experts and community leaders, I've formulated a campaign around a simple message: bring it up. It includes a website with tips on how to talk to unvaccinated friends and answers to their most common vaccine fears. I've also been making related content to share on social media and PSAs for TV to help spread the message. But there's only so much I can do on my own.

 

That's why I've connected with some incredibly talented media professionals in Fort Wayne who are experts in social media marketing and P.R. They've put together proposals to spend just a few thousand dollars on targeted ads and local media outreach that can get this message in front of the nearly three hundred thousand people in Northeast Indiana who are already fully vaccinated.

 

Now obviously we're going to need to do more than just that, which is why we're planning some bigger initiatives for the future, but we want to start small. This first phase is going to cost about five thousand dollars, and I'm putting in the first thousand. Anything we get above and beyond that five will help us do even more targeted outreach and refine our approach.

 

That's why I'm making this video. In the hopes that you or someone you know might be willing to chip in to help us reach that goal.

 

No matter what, I hope you'll consider following us on social media or signing up for email updates as we unveil more of our plans over the coming weeks. Just go to bringitup.org/connect. And of course sharing this video, that helps a lot, too. Thanks.