As part of the emergency response to COVID-19, The Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) was tasked with slowing the spread of COVID-19 in high-risk industries across California. LWDA launched a campaign to educate both workers and employers on California health and safety protocols and workers’ rights related to paid sick leave. This campaign sought to engage community-based organizations across the state to act as trusted messengers and deliver this information directly to their communities.SVM’s role was to develop the technical and strategic infrastructure to mobilize a vast network of community-based organizations and reach California’s most impacted workers and employers with local, trusted voices.

What
we did

• Mobilized 62 contracted CBOs to conduct outreach to workers and employers in higher-risk industries across 6 regions of CA and in 30+ languages
• Supported the development, planning, and training for the CORD platform, which imported real-time COVID, demographic, and employee data from across the state to inform regional targeting strategies and facilitate CBO reporting and evaluation. This platform is now being leveraged by multiple CA state agencies to support community outreach planning and campaign execution.
• Provided overall administrative campaign management, oversaw execution, and acted as conduit between multiple state departments, media agencies, and the CBO network
• Devised a ‘Regional Lead’ structure for the campaign (empowering 12 organizations to manage 9 regional coalitions of CBO partners across the state) and met weekly to analyze regional gaps and strategize on data-informed, hyperlocal outreach tactics
• Developed a collaborative structure to gather local CBO insights and inform the earned and paid media strategies
• Collected and analyzed real-time data to inform individual CBO campaign strategy at the neighborhood level and track trends in outreach tactics and community sentiment
• Provided ongoing marketing support and training to increase CBO capacity and long term skill sets, optimize campaign performance, and reduce day-to-day resource burden