Community Engagement

Our full-service community engagement includes making connections to community partners and/or community leaders/influencers in relevant markets. We have successfully hosted national and regional academic conferences, concerts, community forums, vendor fairs, and national campaigns on COVID-19, Alzheimer’s Disease, and HIV clinical research. This includes consulting on ongoing participant engagement to ensure retention of diverse groups, including communications strategy and social media content informed by evidence-based, community-based approaches to building trust in racial/ethnic minority communities. We also consult with clients to design, plan and implement community engagement events and conferences to raise awareness about issues that address health disparities.

IMPACT

  • Developed strategic policy initiatives for global HIV clinical trials and connection to care in United States, Asia and sub-Saharan Africa resulting in development of FDA Diversity Plan guidelines for clinical trial engagement and development of Good Participatory Practice Guidelines for HIV cure clinical trials

    • Developed, managed, and evaluated evidence-based clinical research engagement & marketing strategies for COVID19 Community Partnership Study resulting in increased minority enrollment by 64% and 333% increase in overall participant enrollment for Wake Forest Baptist Health system in 12 months

  • Developed North Carolina (NC) statewide COVID-19 vaccine engagement strategy to build trust of diverse populations with NIH-funded CEAL Initiative resulting in 17,000 Spanish speaking users reached, 10,000 COVID-19 masks distributed, development of COVID-19 Community Advisory Council and development of Spanish-language COVID-19 website for Wake Forest Baptist Health

  • Developed, implemented, and assessed the Triad Pastors Network, resulting in enrollment of 100 African American pastors and 150K congregation members, development of COVID-19 mobile application to address community needs and establishment of health network

  • Managed COVID-19 community health worker program resulting in 800+ community members to care in 6 months.

  • Supported recruitment of 7000 participants into NC Life Study (Clients were a collaborative of institutions including RTI, GWU, UNC)

Social Marketing

Our partnership with Royalty Marketing enables us to create visually appealing, culturally relevant marketing, combined with our expertise in community engagement and public health messaging, that resonates with diverse audiences and optimizes clinical research engagement.

IMPACT

  • Directed national branding strategies, media relations, and strategic partnerships with national brand ambassadors resulting in a partnership with national celebrities, reaching more than 1M through national media outlets, and leveraging an additional $500K in collective funding for HIV organizations across the south

  • Developed evaluation strategy for national grant making program across four national institutions resulting in a multi-year dataset of collective impact on funding 300+ nonprofit organizations across the US South

Translational Research

We develop dynamic research dissemination tools, including infographic handouts and professionally edited video shorts to translate scientific findings into accessible material for public consumption. This includes development of materials to make complex informed consent documents for clinical trials more accessible to participants.

IMPACT

    • Crowdsourcing contests: We have designed, implemented and evaluated several crowdsourcing contests, which is a type of an intervention that uses community engagement and a bottom-up approach to solving problems. We also help clients identify, develop, and adapt measurement tools to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of crowdsourcing contests for health-related community engagement.

    • Previous contests we have facilitated have elicited 500+ community-based responses per contest to generate solutions focused on improving HIV and COVID-19 clinical research engagement. The contests also resulted in 1500 attendees at 25 events; 75 statewide community-based organizations and corporate sponsors, including Walgreens. Previous clients include UNC Chapel Hill, George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University.