My Move is designed to help individuals who are hesitant about getting the COVID vaccine. It is easy to assume vaccine hesitant people just need missing information, logical arguments, and the advice of someone they respect. But, for many, more information and arguments do not move them. My Move addresses INTERNAL motivations by giving participants a guided opportunity to literally voice their thoughts and make a plan.

What about conspiracy believers? My Move is careful to not elevate conspiracy thinking or get stuck in the non-disprovable loop of conspiracy stories. However, the information in My Move naturally provides an alternative to many conspiracy stories, and the clarification of thoughts that is central to My Move is a natural antedote to conspiracy traps. My Move can help ANYONE think more clearly about their motivations and take reality-based action.

Yes. All of My Move, including audio and videos, is in both Spanish and English. My Move visitors can switch at will between languages.

My Move is not counseling. However My Move encourages participants who remain hesitant to discuss with a healthcare provider — even helping them identify the things they want to talk about.

Compared to an independently-driven process like My Move, counseling has the obvious advantage of a knowledeable professional present in the moment to address exact concerns. Strategies like My Move have the advantages of being anonymous, being available any time and anywhere (that there is Internet access), and requiring very low resources to deliver.

My Move is based on the Self-Persuasion model of behavior change. By providing core vaccine-related information and guiding participants through a structured interactive process of voicing their concerns and motivations, My Move provides a platform to internally clarify thoughts and intentions about getting a COVID vaccine, leading participants to make an appropriate and lasting decision.

My Move is based on a similar program called Project Voice which was developed and studied through a rigorous clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study found a significant positive effect on individuals hesitant about getting their child the HPV vaccine.

Tiro JA, Lee SC, Marks EG, Persaud D, Skinner CS, Street RL, Wiebe DJ, Farrell D, Bishop WP, Fuller S, Baldwin AS. Developing a Tablet-Based Self-Persuasion Intervention Promoting Adolescent HPV Vaccination: Protocol for a Three-Stage Mixed-Methods Study. JMIR Res Protoc. 2016 Jan 29;5(1):e19. doi: 10.2196/resprot.5092. PubMed PMID: 26825137; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC4752693.

One of the key aspects of My Move is the way it leverages internal motivations. As such, it has the potential to be a durable intervention in the face of ever-changing and confusing external information. However, there ARE informational components, and we regularly assess changing information and update those components. For more localized changes, the inclusion of brand-specific custom messages and referral links allows you to provide (and change as often as you like) more specific up-to-date local information.

Although vaccination may be mandated in some specific instances, it is unlikely to be widely mandated for most people. It is even less likely to be enforced. Even in those cases where it is mandated, helping people decide for themselves that getting vaccinated is the appropriate course of action, instead of simply relying on compliance, will lead to longer-term positive outcomes.

The herd is not the world, a country, a state, or even a city. Within each of those populations areas, there are many sub-populations that may or may not have reached a critical level of vaccination and are therefore at risk of localized or larger outbreaks. Because it is difficult to identify the specific sub-populations with inadequate vaccination rates, it is wise to continue to address vaccine hesitancy population-wide even when the broadly-defined population has reached a high level of vaccination.

My Move is completely free to participants. My Move does not have advertisements, does not share any data with advertisers, and does not collect any personal information from visitors. The cost of developing and delivering My Move is paid by the organizations who make My Move available to their constituents.

We priced My Move to be almost free to organizations, and we offer it on a low-commitment basis so organizations can easily manage their costs. Depending on the number of people an organization refers to My Move, the cost of each intervention is as low as 1¢ (1 cent).

Of course the real cost of delivering a program includes the staff time required to make it happen. That is where My Move really shines. It takes very little start-up time and almost no delivery time. Just sign up, make a customized version in under an hour, and send your people to My Move. We handle all intervention delivery.

The Plans page includes more information about costs.

My Move has been developed and is delivered by People Designs — a health communications research and development company located in North Carolina. We have been developing, studying, and delivering public health interventions for over 25 years.

Who is NOT behind My Move? My Move is not funded or directed by any pharmaceutical or other company involved in the development, production, or delivery of vaccines or vaccine components. My Move is not directed or funded by any Federal, state, or local government agencies (although, the original research-tested intervention on which My Move is based was partially funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, a US government agency). People Designs is not owned or directed by any parent company; we are an independent small business.