27 April 2021 – As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, the delivery of health services, including routine vaccinations, have been disrupted – including in Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, Nigeria.

Nigeria has less than 2.5 per cent of the world’s population. And yet, it accounts for 10 per cent of the global burden of infant, child and maternal mortality.

More than 2,300 Nigerian children die every day from diseases that can easily be treated or prevented.

One of the reasons is the low rate of child immunization. At the moment, only 23 per cent of Nigerian children are fully immunized. That figure was 22 per cent in 1995. Nigeria is clearly struggling to keep up with its population growth when it comes to health interventions – and children are one of the biggest casualties.

Clearly much remains to be done and the challenges are enormous – including disruptions due to COVID-19, and vaccine hesitancy. One big factor in saving children’s lives in Nigeria is helping parents, caregivers and communities to understand the critical importance of ensuring children receive their full, age-appropriate immunizations, so that they can both survive and thrive into a healthy future.

Organizations like UNICEF are working to ensure that there is continued uptake of routine immunizations for children, despite the pandemic.

To help drive this work and better understand how to engage parents and communities, UNICEF Nigeria partnered with Facebook through the ‘Insights for Impact Project’ to amplify and test the effectiveness of vaccine messages on its Facebook platform, via an information campaign. The campaign had three main objectives:

Promote the message that vaccines are safe
Communicate that vaccines are effective in protecting children from vaccine-preventable diseases, like polio and measles
Remind caregivers and communities that it is important to continue routine immunization amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

The outcomes of the information campaign were analyzed through a survey comparing people who saw the ads (the test group) with an audience of people who did not see the ads (the control group). If, in comparing both groups, we saw that vaccine acceptance is higher in the test group, then we would know that the ads were effective in promoting the importance of childhood immunization.

The campaign used three different types of messages to persuade communities of the importance of immunization. The three types were: 1) emotional 2) authoritative and 3) informative.

The campaign reached over 16.5 million Nigerians. At the end of the campaign, we asked people in the test and control groups whether they had remembered seeing an ad from UNICEF (ad recall). Overall, the results of the survey revealed that the authoritative campaign was the most memorable, followed by the emotional campaign. Both these messages yielded statistically significant ad recall.

To understand the campaign’s effect on attitudes about vaccine effectiveness, we asked “How effective do you think routine vaccines are in protecting children from devastating childhood diseases?”. We found the authoritative ads worked best, as people who saw the authoritative ads were +1.4 percentage points more likely to say that vaccines were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ effective, when compared to users who had not seen the ads. For this question, we did not see strong results for the emotional and informative messages.

To understand the campaign’s effect on vaccine safety, we asked “How safe do you think routine vaccines are for children?”. Once again, authoritative messages performed the best, as people who saw the authoritative messages were +1.2 percentage points more likely to indicate that vaccines were safe, when compared to people who had not seen the ads. However, we did not observe a significant difference for people who saw the emotional or informative messages.

We also surveyed people on the importance of continuing routine vaccinations during COVID19. However, none of the three messages were effective in driving this objective.

There are no guarantees that a campaign will resonate with people and yield strong outcomes, however, authoritative messages were able to achieve statistically significant results for improving perceptions of vaccine effectiveness and safety.

“At this critical time in the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of this study have been an eye-opener. With this information, we now know how to adjust our digital vaccine campaigns in a way that will address people’s concerns, especially now that the COVID-19 vaccine has become available in Nigeria. The impact of this campaign has not only been useful for our Facebook platform, but for other social media platforms as well – and the learnings will help us define our approach to be most effective with our audiences,” said Eliana Drakopoulos, Chief of Communication, UNICEF Nigeria.
“Having worked on immunization campaigns across several countries, I know that finding the right message to inform communities about the importance of immunizations can be challenging, so it was noteworthy that we identified a successful strategy for building confidence in routine immunization in Nigeria and managed to reach over 16 million people” said Kadeem Khan, Associate Research Manager, Facebook Data for Good. “The results for the authoritative messages in particular, demonstrate the efficacy of digital communication in shifting perceptions of vaccination safety and effectiveness.”

The findings highlight an opportunity to further use authoritative messages to drive immunization outcomes. Altogether, the findings of this campaign may inform wider vaccine-messaging in the region, including the COVID-19 vaccine.

A seamless solution available to 250 million active Truecaller users to set a reason for their calls
Users can now also schedule important SMS to never miss an opportunity & translate messages in the app.

Stockholm, 21 October 2020: Building upon its core proposition of making communication safer and more efficient for their users, Truecaller has rolled out three highly anticipated features: Call Reason, Schedule SMS and SMS Translate for users globally.
Truecaller has been the pioneer in the mobile identity space, and has pushed the innovation of Caller ID to great heights. Consumers trust Truecaller to tell them who is calling but now they will also know why they are calling. Call Reason enables users to set a reason for their call, enabling the receiver to check what the call is about, whether the incoming call is personal, business or something urgent. This would increase pick up rates, especially when callers are calling from new numbers.  

The new ‘Schedule SMS’ extends the platform’s Caller ID feature to enable users to schedule a message reminder of any events, meetings, or what groceries you need to pick up at the end of the day. Additionally, the SMS Translate feature allows users to instantly translate the content of their messages directly in Truecaller without leaving the app. This feature works for both SMS and instant messages (IM). All these features will be free for all consumers.
Commenting on the feature, Rishit Jhunjhunwala, Chief Product Officer at Truecaller said, “We are thrilled at the launch of Call reason, Schedule SMS and SMS Translate. We have been working towards building an innovative communication suite for our users and these three features are the next big step in line with this mission. Communication in 2020 is easier in many ways, but also complicated by the vast ways in which people connect for information. As a brand, we strive to stay true to the core principle of building a product for masses while always acting in the public interest. We are constantly listening to our users and want to help them by putting more power in their hands.”
About Call Reason

The new Truecaller is bringing your communication home, by organising everything for you more easily and smartly. Call Reason was one of the most requested features in 2020 from Truecaller users around the world. With this, the new feature extends the platform’s Caller ID feature to help users to send a note in their outgoing calls. This would empower users in higher pick-up rates on outgoing calls as the receiver would know “what reason the call has been placed”. Businesses can set a customized text before every call which would increase engagement with their customers .

This feature will start rolling out today to all Android users and will be launching for iOS early next year.

Schedule your SMS

Users can schedule SMS by simply selecting the icon while messaging and choose a date and time. Your message will be sent then, and you will always be able to see it scheduled in your chat. This feature is available for Android users only.

SMS Translate
The app automatically detects if a foreign language is used in the messaging screen and will show that a translation is available. This feature is powered by Google’s ML Kit and all messages are processed locally in the phone, which means the content of your messages never leaves your device. Language packs are downloaded to your device before translation begins. Users can also download additional languages to use them offline, anytime and anywhere. SMS Translate will only be available for Android.

About Truecaller:
People use Truecaller to stay ahead. It helps them know who’s getting in touch, filter out unwanted calls and SMS, and focus on what matters. The company provides a suite of unique services such as a dialer that offers caller ID, spam detection, messaging and more. Truecaller’s mission is to build trust everywhere by making communication safe and efficient. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, the company was founded in 2009 by Alan Mamedi and Nami Zarringhalam. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Atomico and Kleiner Perkins.
For more information, please contact: – press@truecaller.com