Evidence-Based Intervention Fact Sheets
Recruitment success for hard to reach audiences
Esperanza Para Los Ninos
Kansas City, Missouri
TCE Grantee
The Esperanza Para Los Ninos (EPLN) program has developed a successful outreach strategy to recruit young immigrant Latina first-time mothers into a program to support the emotional development of their children.
Manual Perez, Project Director, said that these women, most of whom are from Mexico, lack the support system – especially older woman family members – that they would have if they gave birth in their native land. Many do not speak English and stay in their homes while their husbands or boyfriends are at work. This isolation can lead to depression which can result in poor bonding between the mothers and their newborn children. Such poor mother-infant bonding can contribute to long-term emotional and behavioral conduct disorders in children.
Perez and his colleagues decided to implement the UCLA Family Development Project, a culturally-appropriate evidence-based program that features relationship-based home visitation supported by comprehensive parenting classes. But the same isolation that threatened the emotional health of these women and their children also made it difficult to recruit them for the program. In many cases, these women spoke only Spanish (and thus could not be reached using the major media outlets). Living in a dangerous neighborhood and lacking friends and family, many of these women spent much of their time alone (or with only their children) in their apartments. Many of these families are undocumented and thus reluctant to become involved with any agency perceived as “official.” Perez reported that this was the first time that he and his colleagues had implemented a program which needed to recruit a very specific type of participant.
EPLN rose to this challenge. Perez reports that “effective marketing does not just reach its audience – it needs to connect with them. It’s usually a small nuance that makes this emotional connection.” He said that outreach campaigns are especially effective if an audience feels like it was designed specifically for them and if the message is short and easily understood. EPLN sought out the advice of other Latinas involved with the Family Focus Center (the agency in which EPLN would be implemented). These women said that it was important to use a photograph to which young Latinas could relate and to avoid presenting the program as overly “official” since many of these women lack documentation.
The project created an advertisement using a photograph of a group of smiling Hispanic women, several of whom are visibly pregnant, giving the “thumbs-up” sign under the slogan “Is this your first pregnancy? Congratulations!” This ad also explains that “We are here to listen and to help.” and includes a list of free services available to pregnant and parenting Latinas. These advertisements were placed in the Kansas City Hispanic News and the Hispanic Yellow Pages, and also displayed in restaurants, laundromats, and health clinics. The program negotiated discounted rates for these advertisements – money that Perez says was “well-spent” as the outreach campaign proved remarkably successful and EPLN quickly reached its capacity.
The program also advertised in English-language publications to raise its profile and establish credibility with the staff in the hospitals EPLN depended on for referrals.
Perez says that using focus groups to understand precisely where his target audience gets its information contributed to EPLN’s success. It was important to find out precisely which newspapers and radio stations appealed to these women. He also said that the focus groups produced some surprising information – such as the fact that the women also selectively listened to English-language radio and preferred to eat at Chinese restaurants when they had the opportunity to dine out.
