Study design and participants
This three-arm parallel group randomised controlled trial was conducted in September 2021, with post-intervention data collection only (October-December 2021).In July 2021, updated COVID-19 specific Guidelines for New South Wales (NSW) ECEC services (hereafter referred to as the ‘Guidelines’) were released by the NSW Department of Education, and were disseminated by a number of ECEC based bodies. These Guidelines included a variety of recommendations (e.g. staff mask wearing indoors), as well as clear recommendations for ECEC services to adopt an indoor-outdoor program and include more time spent outdoors to help mitigate COVID-19 transmission in NSW ECEC services. This trial sought to evaluate whether two different dissemination strategies (a targeted e-newsletter or animated video) resulted in greater intentions to adopt the Guidelines (i.e. an indoor-outdoor program; and/or more time outdoors) in NSW ECEC services compared with a standard email.A total of 1,400 ECEC services were randomly extracted from a publicly available National register (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority (ACECQA)) [