In New York City, the NYC Care health care access program from NYC Health + Hospitals acts as a lifeline for undocumented immigrants. It guarantees low-cost and no-cost services such as primary care, specialty care (cardiology, podiatry, etc.) and affordable medications to all New Yorkers regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Despite the services available, however, many who are eligible for the program are not aware of it, and are reluctant to seek government services, for fear of deportation or being labeled a public charge. For example, based on estimates from other states, over half of undocumented Latinx immigrants do not have a usual source of care outside the emergency room.
NYC Care approached community-based organizations and community leaders about the 'trust gap,' who spoke of the role of doctors as trusted messengers, and planned a video series featuring doctors encouraging New Yorkers to enroll in the program and schedule a primary care appointment with a physician they trust.
The objective was to create a targeted multilingual video series featuring NYC Health + Hospitals doctors from immigrant backgrounds to highlight the benefits of the program. The videos would feature doctors speaking directly to New Yorkers to alleviate their concerns. The video campaign's performance would be tracked along a number of metrics, such as video views, website traffic, and enrollment- which would ultimately demonstrate how much members would trust our program to deliver them care.
We wanted the videos to be welcoming and approachable for our target audiences while delivering clear and easy-to-understand information. Show the Good, our production partner, took many considerations during production to ensure the viewer felt at home watching the pieces. Interpreters were on site to ensure fidelity to the original translation while keeping the language colloquial and approachable. We filmed the physicians on a seamless white backdrop to allow for graphic overlays to provide key information to members. We created a branded graphic template that could be easily iterated in all four campaign languages. The b-roll in the videos features businesses and community groups in neighborhoods surrounding NYC Health + Hospitals locations. The PSAs themselves, as well as some of the b-roll, was filmed on location at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst in Queens and at NYC Health + Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health. After all four main languages were finished, we professionally captioned the English video in ten additional languages to ensure a broad reach.
Central to the strategy and execution of the project involved creating videos in the top languages of our members: in English, Spanish, Mandarin/Simplified Chinese, and Bengali. Working across these four languages with four different speakers, we recorded the videos to encourage NYC Care-eligible New Yorkers to understand its benefits and enroll in the program.
Once the videos were completed, we wanted to ensure they could reach our target audience. We released the videos in a press conference with the Asian American Federation and invited ethnic and community media to attend. We posted it across our NYC Health + Hospitals social media channels and shared it with our city agency partners to post on their end. We also shared the videos with our 22 community-based organization partners and with internal newsletters. The video was posted on the NYC Care website, and shared on the NYC City government TV stations, NYC Gov and NYC Life. We sent out targeted email blasts to our members, encouraging them to watch the videos to understand the benefits of the program. Finally, the videos were used for targeted social media posts as part of a broad, city-wide public awareness campaign.
Across all of the metrics we tracked, the videos were a success. In the period from when they were launched in June to the end of our fall campaign in December:
