How Social Media Kits Support HIV Communication

Social media kits are collections of key messages, graphics, and sample content that communicators can use across platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to support consistent communication on an issue or event. HIV.gov maintains a collection of social media kits that strengthen communications for national HIV Awareness Days.

HIV.gov supports the HIV community‘s communication efforts for those events by posting links to current social media kits once the organizational leads for each observance release them. You can find the kit links at the top of each of our Awareness Day pages.

The HIV Awareness Day kits vary in format. Most contain key HIV messages that address prevention, treatment, and care and offer facts about the HIV epidemic and its impact on a specific community. Other kit materials may include: posters, flyers, Save-the-Date cards, sample press releases and proclamations, evaluation forms, training tools, etc. Kits also typically define preferred hashtags for specific observances.

How Using Social Media Kits Helps Communication

One upcoming observance is National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NWGHAAD) on March 10, 2019. This commemoration is led each year by the HHS Office on Women’s Health (OWH) with involvement of a wide range of community supporters, both organizational and individuals.

Adrianne Phenix, MS, CHES, Public Health Analyst for OWH, told us about how their NWGHAAD kit supports the goals of this observance:

“OWH wants to make supporting NWGHAAD easy for our partners. One way we do that is by providing a social media toolkit. We include content on our theme, sample social media messages and graphics, sample newsletter content, and relevant links to accessible online resources. We do this all in an effort to amplify the observance and its importance.”

These kits can jumpstart development of your communication on and around the observances and enable you to align your messages with the larger conversation. Bonus: Using the contents of a kit can reduce the time spent in social media management and let you focus on how to make communication best fit your voice and your audience!

For more information and additional resources for NWGHAAD 2019, plan now to visit both our HIV.gov feature page and OWH’s resource section. You can also subscribe for updates about the national health observances.