‘It Takes a Village’ – A community-led flu vaccination campaign

An overview to tickle your tastebuds

How do you encourage people to get their flu vaccine when traditional health messaging isn’t always cutting through?

Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTM UHB) wanted to do things differently. Working with its Community Leaders’ Network – a partnership of more than 130 community organisations and local leaders – it set out to create a campaign shaped by the communities it needed to reach, using trusted local voices, familiar faces and a simple idea about looking out for one another.

jamjar was brought in to turn that ambition into a creative campaign.

The result was It Takes a Village – a bilingual, community-led campaign built around the idea that vaccination isn’t only about protecting yourself. It helps protect your family, friends and the wider community too.

Co-created with local community groups and featuring real people, places and stories from across Cwm Taf Morgannwg, the campaign formed part of a wider behaviourally informed approach to make vaccination communications more relevant, trusted and locally meaningful.

And it made a measurable difference. Flu vaccination uptake increased by 9.6 percentage points among under-65 clinical risk groups and 6.4 percentage points among children aged 2–3, while the wider initiative generated more than 657,000 campaign views and impressions.

The approach has also received national recognition – winning the Vaccination Saves Lives Team Award and being shortlisted for NHS Communications Initiative of the Year at the HSJ Awards 2026.

Getting under the skin of the brief

Flu vaccination uptake across Cwm Taf Morgannwg was lower than it needed to be, with particular challenges among priority groups and in some local communities.

CTM experiences some of the highest levels of deprivation and poorest population health outcomes in Wales, and vaccination uptake was below the Welsh average across most priority groups. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, data also showed a multi-year decline in flu vaccination uptake among key eligible populations.

The brief wasn’t simply to tell people to get vaccinated. It was to find a way of communicating about flu that felt local, relatable and trusted, particularly among communities experiencing health inequalities.

CTM UHB had already established strong relationships through its Community Leaders’ Network. Rather than developing a campaign behind closed doors and taking it out to communities afterwards, those communities were involved from the beginning.

Local organisations and residents from Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf helped shape the approach, bringing insight into the barriers, concerns and conversations happening on the ground.

That behavioural insight highlighted three important factors influencing vaccination uptake: trusted community-led communication, accessible vaccination opportunities, and the confidence and capability to discuss vaccination.

That gave us a clear creative challenge: how could we turn those insights into an idea people would notice, relate to and trust?

It takes a village

From that insight came our creative platform: It Takes a Village.

We took the familiar phrase and gave it a public health purpose.

Because protecting a community from flu takes all of us. The person who gets vaccinated. The family member who encourages them. The community leader who shares trusted information. The local organisation that helps someone understand where they can get their vaccine.

The campaign line – “It takes a village to keep us protected from flu this winter” – turned vaccination from an individual health decision into something collective, positive and rooted in community.

Rather than leading with clinical language or fear, the creative focused on connection, shared responsibility and the people we want to protect.

Putting the community at the heart of the creative

Authenticity was fundamental to the campaign.

Rather than using models or generic stock imagery, we worked with people from across Cwm Taf Morgannwg and put real members of the community at the centre of the creative.

The people featured reflected the diversity of the area, including blind and disabled community members. Photography and video captured people in familiar local settings, helping the campaign feel recognisably CTM rather than like a national health campaign that could have appeared anywhere.

Three hyperlocal promotional videos were produced as part of the initiative, with bilingual communications featuring local people, places and stories co-produced and tested to improve relevance, trust and engagement.

It meant the communities we wanted to reach weren’t simply the audience for the campaign – they were part of creating and delivering it.

And that proved important. Evaluation found that tailored messaging featuring recognisable local people, places and community networks achieved stronger engagement than standardised communications.

As Yvonne Peters, Secretary of Llantrisant and District 50+ Forum, put it:

“In my view, there is nothing more powerful than people speaking directly to their own community, in their own voices, about an issue that matters to them.”

Giving communities the tools to spread the word

We developed It Takes a Village into a flexible bilingual campaign toolkit that could be used by the Health Board and its community partners across Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil and Rhondda Cynon Taf.

The campaign was designed to travel through the networks and relationships that already existed within communities, rather than relying solely on people encountering a message directly from the NHS.

Alongside the creative campaign, behaviourally informed Community Vaccination Champion training built the confidence of trusted local people to talk about vaccination and address misinformation within their own communities.

This was an important part of the wider approach. Trusted organisations and individuals weren’t simply being asked to share a campaign – they were being equipped to have meaningful conversations about vaccination themselves.

And it worked: 100% of Community Vaccination Champions surveyed went on to apply their learning locally.

Learning, adapting and reaching further

The campaign wasn’t static.

CTM UHB combined vaccination uptake data, social media analytics and feedback from community partners to understand what was working and refine messages, formats and content throughout the campaign.

jamjar also supported the campaign through targeted Meta advertising, using vaccination data to focus activity on priority audiences and lower-uptake areas.

Across three months, our paid social activity alone delivered more than 525,000 impressions, reached more than 200,000 people with a very modest spend.

But the real strength came from combining digital reach with trusted community relationships – helping the campaign reach people who may have been less likely to respond to traditional health communications.

Proof is in the pudding

The campaign formed part of an ambitious programme with a clear objective: to increase flu vaccination uptake among eligible CTM populations by at least five percentage points.

The outcomes speak for themselves.

The impact went beyond the numbers too. The initiative strengthened community capability and trusted relationships, while creating opportunities for the approach to be spread and scaled across health protection and the wider NHS.

The approach has also earned national recognition.

CTM UHB’s Community Working Group for Vaccination and Health Protection won the Vaccination Saves Lives Team Award, recognising the collaborative work taking place to improve vaccination uptake and tackle health inequalities.

And It Takes a Village: A Community-Led Approach to Winter Vaccination Communications has since been shortlisted for NHS Communications Initiative of the Year at the HSJ Awards 2026.

For us, that recognition reinforces one of the most important lessons from the campaign: the best communications start by listening.

A model for doing things differently

It Takes a Village shows what can happen when community engagement isn’t treated as something that happens after the creative work is finished.

The communities CTM UHB wanted to reach helped shape the insight. Their experiences informed the strategy. Local people became the faces and voices of the creative. Community partners helped carry the message. And data and feedback allowed the approach to evolve throughout the campaign.

The result was more than a communications campaign. It combined co-production, behavioural science, creative thinking and trusted community partnerships to make vaccination communications more relevant, trusted and locally meaningful – contributing to measurable improvements in uptake among priority populations.

Because when it comes to protecting our communities, it really does take a village.