The start of a new year means many nonprofits and community health workers are busy setting goals and reflecting on what’s worked and what hasn’t. For those engaged in vaccine outreach, it also means reflecting on the tools and tactics that help them communicate better with their communities about why vaccines matter.

Across the country, childhood vaccination rates have declined since the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a resurgence of preventable diseases like pertussis. 

Also known as whooping cough, pertussis has surged in states like Idaho, said Karen Jachimowski Sharpnack, executive director of the Idaho Immunization Coalition, in a conversation with PGN about the organization’s 2025 priorities. 

Sharpnack shared how spikes in infectious respiratory illnesses can create opportunities to listen better and understand the nuances of the communities they serve.

Here’s more of what Sharpnack said.

[Editor’s note: The contents of this interview have been edited for length and clarity.]

PGN: Whooping cough cases are up in your state. Can you share an example of how your organization is responding?

Karen Jachimowski Sharpnack: If you look at Treasure Valley and Northern Idaho, the majority of those cases have been reported, and it’s like five times as much as we had the previous year. 

So, two things that the Coalition is doing in response: First, we put out radio public service announcements throughout those particular areas about what whooping cough is, how contagious it is, and what you should do if you think your child or anyone you know has it. 

Second, we are contacting every school superintendent, principal, school nurse, with a letter from us at the Coalition [to warn about] the whooping cough outbreaks in schools right now. Here’s what the symptoms are, here’s what you can do, and then here’s how you can protect yourself and your families. 

It doesn’t mean the health district wouldn’t do it, or the Department of Health and Welfare can’t do it. But from our standpoint, at least we are bringing an awareness to the schools that this is happening. 

PGN: How does your organization decide when outreach is needed? How do you take a pulse of your communities’ vaccine attitudes?

K.J.S.: We consistently hold listening sessions. We do them in English and Spanish if we need to, and we go around—and I’m talking about the southern part of the state—and bring people together. 

We’ve done adults, we’ve done teenagers, we’ve done college students, we’ve done seniors, we’ve done all age groups. 

So, we’ll bring eight or 10 people together, and we’ll spend a couple of hours with them. We feed them and we also pay them to be there. We say, ‘We want to hear from you about what you’re hearing about vaccines, what your views are if you’re vaccinated.’ Anytime, by the way, they can get up and leave and still get paid. 

We want to hear what they’re hearing on the ground. And these sessions are extremely informational. For one, we learn about the misinformation that goes out there, like immediately. And two, we’re able to then focus [on how to respond]. If we’re hearing this, what kind of media campaign do we need to get together?

PGN: How do these listening sessions inform your work?

K.J.S.: So, a couple times a year we also pay a professional poller to do a poll. And when we get those results we check them against our listening sessions. We want to see: Are we on target? Are we ahead? 

We just finished putting a one-pager together for legislators, so we’re ready to go with the new [legislative] session. We do this poll every year in August-September to know how Idahoans are feeling about vaccines. We get the results in October, because we’re getting ready for the next year. 

We actually poll 19-to-64-year-olds, really honing in on questions like, ‘Do you believe vaccines are safe and effective?’ ‘Do you believe that school vaccination rules should still be in place?’

And what’s pretty cool is that two-thirds of Idahoans still believe vaccines are safe and effective, want to keep school rules in place, and believe that the infrastructure systems that we have in place for our vaccine registry should remain the same. Those are important to hear, so this is really good information that we can pull out and do something with.

PGN: Like what?

K.J.S.: Here’s the bottom line. It takes money to do this work, so you have to be able to say what you are going to do with the results. 

Doing a poll costs anywhere from $15,000 to $35,000. This is an expensive investment, but we know that the polling is so important to us, along with the time that I have my staff go out and do the listening sessions and get feedback. 

We take those results to educate, to talk to our legislators, and advocate for vaccines. We actually do these high-level media campaigns around the state. So, we are actually doing something with the polling. We’re not just sharing the results out. 

And then we actually ask, what can we do to make a change? What are we hearing that we need to focus on? 

That’s why it’s really important, because we are actually pushing this out for 2025. We know where we’re going in 2025 programmatically with marketing, and we know where we’re going with advocacy work. 

We’re not guessing. We’re actually listening to people. And then we’re making really concrete decisions on how we’re going to move the organization forward to be able to help our communities.

This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.