California is facing a critical shortage of Certified Nurse Assistants. By 2030, one in five California residents will be over 65, placing immense pressure on nursing homes already struggling to fill CNA roles. The problem isn't just pay or access to training. It's perception. CNA roles are often dismissed as temporary, low-skill work, when in fact they are credible entry points into lifelong healthcare careers. That misperception hits hardest in the communities most likely to pursue the role. QCHF's California Nurse Assistant Program (CNAP) was built to close that gap.
This entry represents Year 2 of a five-year statewide initiative under the platform "Create Your CNA Story," anchored at yourcnastory.org. The campaign's goals: drive 1 million website visitors and recruit 5,700 new CNAs across California by 2027. The mission is to raise awareness of the CNA role as a credible, stable, and meaningful career path. Not to glamorize it, but to legitimize it across California's diverse, multilingual workforce.
The campaign targets two distinct but complementary audiences: English-speaking adults ages 18–40 who are early-career seekers and view CNA as an accessible, in-demand entry into healthcare, as well as Hispanic, Vietnamese, and Chinese adults ages 27–40 who are often already caring for loved ones at home. For them, becoming a CNA formalizes skills and values they already live. California's demographic complexity made a multilingual approach essential: the communities most likely to enter the CNA workforce are those most underserved by English-only outreach.
In 2025, CNAP completed its evolution into a true four-language campaign. Building on the English and Spanish foundation established in Year 1, Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese media launched in May 2025, bringing all four target audiences into market simultaneously for the first time.
A foundational strategic decision shaped everything that followed: keep production lean and invest in reach. Rather than concentrating budget in high-cost creative production, the team developed purposeful, audience-specific assets using a streamlined approach, then directed the majority of investment toward paid media placement and optimization. This discipline is what allowed CNAP to run a genuine four-language campaign at scale, on a $1.3M media budget, delivering nearly 38 million impressions statewide in 2025.
The campaign platform, "Create Your CNA Story," was designed to do more than inform. It was built to empower. By positioning the CNA journey as personal, meaningful, and achievable, the platform invites prospective candidates to see themselves as the heroes of their own story. This narrative-driven approach gave each language execution an emotional anchor beyond functional messaging.
Creative was developed natively for each language audience, not translated from English. Each execution was written and art-directed for its specific community, with messaging hierarchies validated by consumer research. Spanish-language audiences required a distinct brief, with financial accessibility elevated as the primary message. Chinese and Vietnamese creative was built around message territories specific to those communities. Younger English-speaking audiences were reached through platform-native formats designed for their media behavior. The result was culturally resonant work across four audiences, produced efficiently enough to fund the media weight needed to move the needle.
The multicultural strategy was grounded in a 2023 AI-assisted consumer study that established an audience-validated messaging hierarchy. A full-funnel media model, with always-on Paid Search and Meta for intent and traffic, and OTT/CTV, Streaming Audio, Programmatic Display, and Native for awareness, continuously seeded and converted audiences across the funnel. Hispanic-endemic publisher partnerships deepened cultural relevance for Spanish-speaking audiences.
Channel investment was continuously reallocated based on performance data. Native Display was scaled aggressively after delivering 36% of site clicks on just 3.4% of budget. Every dollar followed the data.
CNAP's 2025 results validated both the multicultural strategy and the production-efficient media approach. The campaign delivered 349,749 total site visits to yourcnastory.org, exceeding the 250,000 annual goal by 40%, on $1.3M in media spend. Nearly 38 million impressions were generated statewide at an approximate cost per site visit of $3.72.
New users broke down across four language audiences: English (84%), Spanish (12%), Chinese (2%), and Vietnamese (1%). Spanish's share of total traffic significantly outpaced its share of overall budget, a direct validation of the audience-specific creative strategy.
Campaign momentum compounded throughout the year. In Q4 alone, click volume grew 26% quarter-over-quarter against flat spend, overall CTR doubled, and the campaign generated 1.25 million completed video and audio views at a 92% completion rate. All channels performed at or above benchmark.
The multicultural strategy proved out at the audience level. Spanish-language audiences drove outsized engagement relative to budget, with search behavior shifting meaningfully toward elder care and CNA-specific intent. Vietnamese and Chinese audiences, in market since May 2025, showed improving engagement trends and search behavior beginning to shift toward CNA-specific terms. In communities that had never been reached, CNAP was building something more than awareness. It was making a healthcare career feel possible.
