A dating app sent one message, and HIV testing jumped

HIV prevalence in China is 0.06% overall and **8.0% among men who have sex
with men** — up from 1.0% in 2003. With an estimated 5 to 10 million
MSM in China, 50–75% of those who are HIV-positive do not know it.

**Stigmatisation of same-sex behaviour presents challenges for prevention and
treatment**, which is the polite formulation of why a health campaign run
through clinics reaches almost nobody in this group.

So the campaign was run somewhere else.

Where the people already are

Blued is a Beijing company running **the largest gay male–oriented social
and geosocial networking app in China** — launched 2012, **about 27 million
registered and 12 million monthly users** as of 2016. Since 2013 it has
also operated six drop-in HIV testing sites in Beijing, designed to be
gay-friendly, serving about 700 men a month by 2017.

China has more than 660 million smartphone users.

What the campaign was

Three steps, each smaller than the last in effort and larger in reach:

1. March 2015 — a one-time mass private message through the app,
   using GPS to reach users while they were inside Beijing municipality,
   encouraging them to get tested
2. Monthly electronic banners promoting testing on the app's launch screen
3. July 2016 — an appointment platform embedded in the app: tap the
   advertisement, pick a nearby site and a date, get a confirmation text

The geolocation is the clever part. A national message about Beijing clinics is
noise to most recipients; a message only sent to people standing in Beijing is
an offer.

A sharp increase in HIV testing followed the launch, and the trend
continued — particularly among those aged 35 and under.

Anonymity, kept deliberately

At the testing site, after written informed consent, participants gave **their
Blued nickname, birth date, telephone number and student status**.

**To adhere to the national mandate for anonymous HIV testing, names and
national identity numbers were not collected.**

Only screening tests were recorded, and **everyone with a positive rapid
result was contacted and referred for confirmatory testing** through local
health authorities.

For the analysis, records were deduplicated into a person-based dataset using
an identifier built from date of birth and telephone number, and Blued
created the deidentified dataset that CDC China analysed. Approved by the
institutional review board of China CDC's National Center for AIDS/STD Control
and Prevention.

The transferable idea

Effective high-yield testing is the entry point for HIV care, and the group
that most needs it is the one traditional health care activities struggle to
reach.

**Leveraging social media platforms and their geolocation-based text
messaging functionality might be useful in increasing HIV testing among MSM.**

Not an advertising campaign about a clinic. A message inside the application
people already use to meet each other, sent to them where they are, with the
appointment two taps away.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MMWR.