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Tag: science promotion

The Role of a Commentary in Earned Media Outreach

In the big, fast-moving world of health care communications, there’s such a flood of news and information that it can seem almost impossible to make your client’s voice stand out above the noise of the crowd. But it’s more important than ever to try to find ways for their voice to be heard, which is why we are paying more and more attention to the power of the well-crafted and well-placed commentary.

The commentary is an effective communications tool to allow your client to display their expertise in a conversational, accessible manner. Finding a home for the commentary in an outlet that represents their industry can highlight your client’s qualifications in their field. And the personal nature of the commentary also positions your client as someone whose viewpoint demands attention. By writing a commentary for your client, it allows them to enter the conversation du jour in an organic and outstanding way.

I had the opportunity to explore the power of the commentary to its fullest potential earlier this spring. Our client was looking to increase awareness of their annual scientific meeting in Washington, D.C. After discussing their goals for the meeting, which included elevating their reputation, attracting media attention and promoting the important discussions at their meeting, we decided to add a commentary into our earned media strategy and outreach.

As public relations professionals, we know that a commentary is an opportunity to play to our author’s strengths. It’s an ideal vehicle for showcasing their unique perspective. When speaking with the author about her goals for the piece, we concerned ourselves with the “why?” of the commentary as much as the who, what, where and when.

Though a compelling commentary should always be supported by proven research, it’s also an opportunity to have a conversation with the audience. A commentary focuses more on the author’s personal interpretation of research than on the facts themselves. Because of this, the author can inject more of her personal character into the piece. This human touch serves to answer why her analysis deserves a place in the conversation.

Placing this commentary in a popular medical outlet before the meeting helped the speaker establish her credibility in her field by displaying the depth and breadth of her knowledge. It also showcased the kind of high-quality work that would be discussed at the meeting. This served to elevate the client’s reputation as a don’t-miss attraction at the meeting and gained the author a foothold in some of the most closely followed conversations of the day.

 

How PR Can Make a Meaningful Public Health Impact

Everyone has their own unique career journey. As a recent grad who just last year received my master’s in Public Health, I may not be the typical person you might think would be working at a PR agency. Public health is an incredibly broad field – some of my colleagues are tracking infectious diseases or managing hospital operations, while I spend my workdays drafting press releases, conducting media outreach and supporting communications campaigns.

Fortunately, it’s turned out that health communications, an important aspect of public health, has been the perfect niche for me to start my career. My background in public health helps me understand the science and context behind the messaging strategies we employ. The experience I’m gaining at TRG has made me a more effective communicator and given me a practical understanding of how people receive messages about health.

I’ve seen firsthand the importance of strong communications skills in the world of public health, particularly in a time when many people rely more on social media than their own physician for health advice. We can – and must – employ solid public relations strategies to impact public health for the better.

Understanding your audience. One of the key points that was emphasized in my public health classes was that no one wants to adopt healthy behaviors if they’re just being talked at and not understood. Think about when your doctor simply tells you to “try eating healthier” without any additional information or tips customized to your specific situation, background or schedule. It’s frustrating, right?

People want information that is relatable – and this is where public relations comes in. Knowing our audience is key in developing content for campaigns or preparing spokespeople for media interviews. One way we do this is by making sure we’re up to date on news coverage, frequently scanning the media so we know what our clients’ priority populations are seeing about various health topics.

Digging deeper than just scanning the headlines is important: have there been any recent changes in coverage in a particular area? Are there any new polls available that survey people about their knowledge, attitudes and beliefs around a health topic? Being up to date on all aspects of coverage keeps us in close touch with our audiences. Take vaccination for example: we need to be fully aware of the most recent changes in public attitudes, such as vaccine fatigue and skepticism, if we expect to make successful pitches to the media and effectively reach our intended audience.

Reviewing science responsibly. As communications professionals, it’s our job to come up with fresh and creative ways to promote our clients’ news and viewpoints. But it’s essential that we always take extra care to make sure the messages we are sharing are completely clear and accurate. In the field of health care, our audience is often patients who are relying on information from trusted sources. We have the responsibility to guard against dangerous misinformation as our first priority.

At TRG, we work with many scientific organizations and conferences to promote the latest science and research being presented at their events. We need to carefully read the latest research papers, and we must also conduct deeper, probing conversations with the researchers so we clearly understand their methods and their findings to make sure that consumers clearly understand the importance of this new health information. As we all saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation can be incredibly harmful.

In my day-to-day work at TRG, I wear many different hats, but everything I do is part of a larger chain of events that impacts people’s health. This is my “why” for coming to work each day and trying to provide the best product possible for our clients. Ultimately, our “clients” are not just the organizations we work for, but also the end users in the public who rely on us for vital, accurate communications about their health.

Promoting Science: How to Get the Media to Cover Research

As a communications firm dedicated to health and medicine, promoting science is a major pillar of our work. Over years on The Reis Group team, I have worked to generate national media coverage for dozens of journal articles and scientific abstracts. My background includes a master’s degree in public health, which taught me the importance of a critical eye when reviewing any piece of research. Even studies from prestigious medical institutions conducted through the “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials may have significant limitations that could undercut the findings. As public relations professionals, we must be able to discern whether the research is both rock-solid and newsworthy, as well as important for our audience.

For example, a medical society client of ours recently sought publicity to promote research on a pain treatment for breast cancer patients. Our goal was to place one or two stories during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The treatment was novel—but not easily understood.

Translating the science

Our first step, as with any research we promote, is to understand the science. This means getting a firm grasp on the goal of the research, the methodology used, and most importantly, the findings and their implications. Not everything is worthy of a news release. The keys to attracting attention from sharp science reporters: Make sure the sample size is large enough, the findings are statistically significant, and the methodology is solid. If you’re not careful and accurate, you risk very bad outcomes for you and your client.

What does your audience need to know?

It’s not enough to promote a study’s primary outcome. The media (and your audience) won’t be interested unless you convey the real-life significance of the findings.

When brainstorming the all-important headline, make sure you check with the researchers to make sure they agree with your approach. In your eagerness to push for a newsworthy angle, you might inadvertently badly exaggerate the meaning of the findings. Your researchers can make sure you are not erroneously hyping a “miracle treatment.” Even one careless word choice can misrepresent findings, and your credibility—and your client’s—could take a catastrophic hit.

Demonstrate impact through stories

“Human interest” remains a very powerful tool to generate media interest when promoting science. If the researcher can produce a study participant willing to share their story, it can be a huge factor in attracting media coverage. We profiled a breast cancer patient who was a mother of two young children, a wife, and a professional ballerina. She was forced to give up her career and was unable to take care of her children because of excruciating pain following her double mastectomy. Nothing she tried helped, including multiple surgeries and opioids. She had joined a clinical trial we were promoting, and the treatment helped her immensely. She was so grateful that she wanted to share her story so that other women might find the same relief.

Telling her story was the key to placing an article on the TODAY Show’s website: Post-mastectomy pain made her feel ‘on fire.’ Nerve freezing offered relief. The reporter interviewed both the patient and our researcher. The article highlighted the ground-breaking findings. This prominent national placement made our client incredibly happy. Without our showing how research impacted an everyday person, we would never have drawn national attention.

Promoting science has always been a vital part of the public discourse. But now, more than ever in the age of social media, we must make sure that the information and interpretation we promote to the media is both accurate and crystal clear. It is exciting and rewarding to succeed, but it can be devastating to fail.

Ethical and Accurate Science Promotion: Lessons from COVID-19 and Hydroxychloroquine

This article previously appeared in PRSA-NCC  :

The Guardian recently published an article on how the lupus drug hydroxychloroquine came to be touted as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19. This story is a must-read for any of us in public relations involved in promoting medical research. The article traces the beginnings of the hype of the drug as a potential cure and the deadly results. It provides a primer for distinguishing between valid and misleading research to protect the credibility of our clients—and ourselves.

Reporter Julie Carrie Wong explains several red flags in the initial hydroxychloroquine study that spurred speculation about its use for coronavirus. She cites common flaws in research that most health journalists and public relations practitioners should know to watch for: it was a small study that was not randomized, well-controlled, or blinded. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard for research because they compare similar patients that are treated the same except that some randomly get the treatment being tested and some do not. Ideally, trials have enough participants to ensure the results are meaningful, and they are blinded so neither the patient nor the evaluating physician knows who received the treatment to eliminate conscious or unconscious bias.

Wong also notes less commonly identified red flags that require a more careful reading of the study, like the number of patients “lost to follow-up.” This refers to patients who dropped out of the study, potentially skewing the results. Dropping or losing track of patients who don’t do well on the treatment makes it easier to claim a 100% success rate, as was done in the hydroxychloroquine trial at the center of this story.

Our agency has declined to promote small studies with large numbers of dropouts. In one case, researchers, for various reasons, didn’t count the results for several patients in the treatment group, while no one in the control group was uncounted or “lost to follow up.” This practice made the results questionable at best or an outright lie at worst.

Claims of 100% success should always raise an eyebrow and make you look closer and the research methods. In nearly 15 years of writing about medical research, I’ve never seen a well-controlled randomized trial tout 100% success.

Another red flag in the hydroxychloroquine study was the use of possibly misleading “endpoints.” In this case, researchers based their claim of the drug’s success on whether virus was found on a nose swab rather than whether patients recovered or died. Such “surrogate” endpoints are often used in medical research because it can take too long to get to meaningful clinical endpoints—such as progression of the illness or death. Such alternate endpoints should be scrutinized and well-justified.

Wong did a great job describing some of the basics of detecting misleading research. Her story can serve as a primer for ethical promotion of medical research.

Besides damaging our own reputation as public relations professionals, inappropriately touting research can actually hurt or even kill people. With hydroxychloroquine, a man in Arizona died and his wife became critically ill after they tried to treat themselves by ingesting a fishbowl water treatment that contained chloroquine phosphate, a compound related to hydroxychloroquine. Moreover, people suffering from lupus who desperately need the drug to manage their condition cannot get it because it has been hoarded in hopes of treating COVID-19. In addition, hydroxychloroquine has potentially serious side effects, including eye problems and potentially deadly heart rhythm issues or heart failure.

The jury is still out on whether hydroxychloroquine is effective against coronavirus. We will be watching for upcoming controlled clinical trials to provide scientifically sound evidence about whether this drug is worth the risks. And we will be watching for opportunities to ethically promote science by providing appropriate perspective on the value of this research.

What do PR professionals do when COVID-19 cancels major annual meetings?

This article previously appeared in PRSA-NCC and O’Dwyer’s:

Nearly 30 annual scientific meetings have already been canceled, postponed, or moved into a virtual format because of the coronavirus pandemic. Countless more major events will succumb as shelter-in-place and stay-at-home guidance is extended through April and beyond. As a healthcare-focused agency, The Reis Group is quickly adapting to a new reality.

For healthcare communications professionals who use these significant gatherings to promote medical advances and scientific expertise, we are instantly forced to scrap our artfully crafted media plans. What happens to your press program? How can you still get information out about your big meeting?

Public relations professionals must be optimists and problem-solvers. This is just another (huge) challenge to work around as we creatively look to meet our objectives of communicating scientific advances. Regardless whether the meeting is cancelled, postponed, or gone virtual, here are key points we consider in recrafting our multifaceted media approach:

Competing with COVID-19: Coronavirus is dominating the news, yet have to remember there is still some space for non-COVID stories. Look hard to research the best timing, angle, and targets, and tap into your contacts. Many medical specialties, trade publications, and niche verticals are hungry for content, especially with the loss of cutting-edge research news from major meetings.

Finding your news peg: It’s, uh, pretty hard to promote research from a meeting that didn’t happen. So, we need to creatively adjust news pegs. Are presentation abstracts published in a Society journal? Will there be a virtual meeting or preview that will present new work? Identifying the “why now” will be important in your outreach to select reporters.

Rescheduling your embargo: Many meeting presentations are embargoed until the date and time of presentation. Others are released online with the conference materials. Work with your meeting team to hold back studies from immediate release and coordinate with researchers so that you can maintain exclusivity of the work for your promotional efforts.

Making your story easy to cover: Journalists are under incredible pressure right now. Think through how you can make it as easy as possible for a reporter to cover your story—know the availability of your experts, have your images ready to transmit–with source credits. Digital and print journalists are navigating a whole new world of virtual conferences and tele-reporting, too.

Thinking beyond your normal promotional approach: Getting a societies’ work covered beyond a news release will require some outside-the-box thinking. Can you host virtual office hours with researchers? Coordinate taped skype interviews, or local broadcast outreach in researchers’ home markets? Host virtual media briefings around key topics? Diversify to other specialty trade publications? Or maybe spotlight key trade reporters in a roundtable social media conversation to comment on the field of research?

2020 will likely not turn out to be a groundbreaking year for meeting coverage, but communication about health and the science remains vital to move your field forward. This year, more than ever, communicators need to harness their creativity and fast thinking to overcome challenges to achieve their communications objectives.

Our Approach to Promoting Science at Annual Meetings

At The Reis Group we are constantly innovating and evolving the ways we work with clients to promote important research coming out of scientific meetings. As publications cut their news staff in half, and the digital wave continues to transform the PR landscape, it’s important to stay ahead of the latest trends, while also recognizing when to stick to tried and true tactics.

Here are five communications trends to jumpstart the media potential of your next annual meeting:

  1. Ditch news conferences for media partnerships and live social events
  2. Expand coverage through embargo “waves” to appeal to the 24/7 news cycle
  3. Offer reporters an added visual perspective through video packages
  4. Highlight abstracts with click-worthy headlines
  5. Host informal roundtables with leading experts and media to discuss hot topics emerging from the meeting

In addition to managing the press room for scientific meetings, The Reis Group works with medical societies on consumer education campaigns, thought leadership, and positioning of important issues. Check out our case studies and services to learn more about our work in science promotion, public education, advocacy relations, and thought leadership.

How to Build Effective Coalitions That Advance Your Health Care Cause

Whether you are promoting new scientific findings, advocating for a profession, advancing legislation or trying to change behavior, it takes a group of people working together to have a sustained influence. But finding ways to effectively collaborate as a team can be challenging. As Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning; Keeping together is progress; Working together is success.”

Below are takeaways that are relevant for groups considering forming or joining a coalition to advance a cause.

  1. Find common ground and language through careful messaging research. Groups often come together because they agree an issue is important. More often than not, though, they do not agree on how to talk about it. In fact, they often disagree passionately. Market research can help address individual concerns and find the common ground and the precise language to address each organization’s worries, avoid turf issues and allay fears in an unbiased and data-driven way, all while keeping everyone focused on the main goal.
  2. Increasing awareness of an issue has to be emotion- and science-based. To achieve your goals, you will need to influence perceptions and discussions to include science and emotionally resonant personal stories to attract attention and motivate audiences to act.
  3. The issue and the ask need to be specific. Sometimes coalitions form for a general purpose and can get bogged down in politics. While coalition members won’t agree on everything, they need to remain in sync on the core issue. Being able to focus on one issue with such unanimity will ensure you do not get caught up in organizations’ differing priorities outside of the coalition.
  4. The consumer voice is powerful. It isn’t enough to talk about your point of view and simply explain the science or the rational thinking behind your perspective. Instead, it is critical to focus on putting a face to the issue and concentrate on the direct impact your goals will have upon the lives of real people in real communities.
  5. Allow organizations to tackle topics and activities on their own. Identifying specific areas of agreement is what will make the coalition successful. Recognizing in advance that there will be areas where you will be unable to find common ground is crucial. You will need to agree to disagree. Focus on working together in one area and then allow individual organizations to undertake efforts with their own perspective on related issues. Doing so will increase engagement among each organization’s individual constituencies.
  6. Honest, constructive conversations are a must. Having a group of smart, passionate people together sometimes can lead to heated discussions. A capable and credible leader within a coalition needs to play a mediator role and maintain a high level of professionalism.
  7. Building trust among the diverse groups is essential. To do so, everyone’s interests must be fairly represented and given sufficient attention. Convene regular calls and in-person coalition meetings to provide forums to share insights and opinions and build relationships.

Coalitions are a great way to work together to achieve goals and they offer many benefits–when structured correctly. Sharing resources, bringing passionate, diverse voices together, creating a force behind an issue and sharing successes with a team can be professionally and personally rewarding.

This article was originally published by PR News.

Public Communication in Science Promotion

A study released in Pediatrics shows that an increasing number of pediatricians are facing parents who refuse routine, recommended vaccinations for their children. Pediatricians perceive that ill-informed parents have come to believe that vaccines, which prevent life-threatening illnesses and hold epidemics at bay, are somehow unnecessary or even dangerous.

I choose to vaccinate my children and try to help them understand the benefit through positive reinforcement provided by characters in their favorite books, like The Berenstain Bears Go to the Doctor:

Stella Moore, attending to Jackson Moore, during a recent "doctor" visit.
Stella Moore attending to Jackson Moore during a recent “doctor” visit.
“Why do we have to have shots when we’re not even sick?” said Sister.
“You see, there are some kinds of medicine that you take after you get sick, and those are very useful. But this kind of shot is a special medicine that keeps you from getting sick,” said Dr. Grizzly.

A good portion of our work at The Reis Group involves promoting scientific findings and medical perspectives of some of the top health care professionals and organizations in the country. It’s vital that we continue to elevate the profile of researchers and clinicians doing great work, helping to promote their efforts and findings into the public space. People learn more about health from the media than from their doctors, friends or family. Television shows, like Dr. Oz and The Doctors, even the TODAY Show, carry significant weight in informing and shaping the attitudes and opinions of the general public. Most of these programs employ contributing medical professionals who have a track record of effectively delivering a soundbite, looking more to the entertainment value than the actual medical expertise.

While ratings and viewers help these shows exist, it shouldn’t be at the expense of having evidence-based reporting, communicated by expert guests with legitimate credentials who deliver sound recommendations. We’re fortunate to work with organizations and professionals who share our value for evidence-based medicine and health care, but more work is needed to ensure that news outlets and health entertainment shows turn to credible research to inform the public.