Public Health Communications for Impact: Approaches to Strengthening Infrastructure

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

O'KEYLA COOPER:
All right, hello and welcome to everyone. Thank you all for joining today's webinar, Public Health Communications for Impact, Approaches to Strengthening Infrastructure. My name is O’Keyla Cooper, Advisor for Data Modernization and Public Health Infrastructure Communications at ASTHO, and we're excited to have you here.

Before we dive in, just a few announcements and technical reminders. All participants will be muted during the session, and the chat box will be disabled for the duration of the webinar. Closed captions will be enabled.

We will have a dedicated Q&A portion toward the end of the session, so as you hear from our speakers, feel free to drop your questions in the Q&A box. This session is being recorded, and the materials and recording will be shared following this session.

Our agenda today includes a presentation on the Public Health Communications Collaborative Action Guide, followed by a moderated panel discussion on improving communications infrastructure in the field. And then we'll close with Q&A and an evaluation.

So now, I'm pleased to introduce to you our featured speaker, Amanda Kwong. Amanda is the Public Health Communications Collaborative Director at the de Beaumont Foundation. As PHCC's director, Amanda manages the development of timely, relevant, and practical tools for public health communicators across the country. Through these communication tools and learning opportunities, PHCC helps health professionals communicate more effectively to ensure that everyone has what they need to make informed decisions about their health. Previously, Amanda was a Campaign Director at the Ad Council, where she spent almost 6 years overseeing the development, implementation, and evaluation of fully integrated multimedia communications on behalf of nonprofit organizations and federal government agencies. Amanda holds a MPH from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in Psychology from Syracuse University. So today, Amanda will kick us off by walking us through the key approaches for the PHCC Action Guide, highlighting strategies to strengthen communications infrastructure and improve how agencies communicate impact. And after her presentation, she will transition us to a panel discussion, where she'll be joined by health department leaders who will share how some of these approaches are being applied in practice. I'm happy to turn it over to you, Amanda.

AMANDA KWONG:
Awesome, thank you so much, O’Keyla. And thank you, ASTHO team, for inviting me in. I'm so excited to be with you all in space today for one of the most powerful resources the Public Health Communications Collaborative has released to date.

So as O’Keyla mentioned, I'm very proud to be the director of this incredible collaborative. We've been around for over five and a half years, were born during the pandemic to serve as a resource and information hub for public health communicators. So our governmental public health comms folks, that was our first focus audience. We were saying, let's find ways to give you evidence, plain language communications around pandemic response, and now we've really evolved our messaging model to cover about 40 different topics, and even the most urgent ones, like Ebola and Hantavirus. But for the purposes for today, I really want to spend some time focusing on this powerful resource that we call our PHCC Action Guide. And this was designed in partnership with one of my very close colleagues, Emma Proust, she's a Senior Program and Research Associate at the de Beaumont Foundation, and she spent a whole two years working on this resource, so I want to give all the hard work that she's put into it justice in delivering as the Director of PHCC.

All right, so for our time today, I'm going to start with why and how we created this resource. I'll then walk through the key findings and give you a quick overview of what's inside. From there, we'll do a deep dive into one chapter as an example of how to use this guide in practice. There's a lot in this resource, and we won't be able to cover everything today, but my goal here is to really have you leave with a clear understanding of what this guide offers, how to use it, and how it can be… and how it can best support your work. We created this Action Guide to support public health communicators who want to strengthen the strategy and operations behind their communications departments. This guide is designed to meet teams truly where they are. It acknowledges real constraints like time, staffing, and resources, while also helping teams spot opportunities to work more strategically within those realities.

We often hear the phrase, if you've seen one health department, you've seen one health department. And while that's true in some ways, that mindset can sometimes unintentionally lead to inaction. Our starting premise for this project was that variation is real, but so are shared dynamics across communications teams at health departments. Comms teams across these health agencies face a common set of factors that either enable or hinder their effectiveness. And naming those factors is a first step towards doing something about them. Okay, we focused on answering these two core research questions, which is first understanding how are communication departments structured and supported across state and local public health agencies? This includes understanding staffing, organizational structure, and funding within communications departments. It also includes understanding the functions that support dissemination, community connection, think about social media, translation, and community outreach, and how those functions are connected to practice.

The second is, we wanted to hear directly from communicators about their experiences. We asked what helps them be effective, and what gets in the way, and how they can build on what's working while navigating real-world constraints. So this is really focusing on what can we understand from communicators that either enhances or hinders their communications effectiveness? Ultimately, the goal of these two core questions was not to just create a clearer picture of communications departments on the whole, but also to spark dialogue and action to strengthen them. Looking into methods. We partnered with researchers at the Harvard Opinion Research Program to conduct in-depth interviews with 50 communicators working in public health agencies across the country. So if you take 50 interviews, 1 hour each, yes, that is 50 hours of really rich authentic conversations with comms specialists from across the country. These folks in these conversations are responsible for developing public-facing communications for their agencies. So while their titles and day-to-day responsibilities varied, they all shared these core common communications responsibilities, like media relations, social media, content development, website management, campaign development, and material creation.

We also intentionally recruited participants to reflect a wide range of contexts. This includes state and local agencies of different sizes, governance structures, regions, and political environments.

I won't spend too much time on methods, but I want to underscore that this Action Guide is grounded in the lived experiences of public health communicators across the country.

This table highlights key participant characteristics, just to give you a sense of who we spoke with. We interviewed a strong mix of communicators from state and local health agencies, including agencies of varying sizes.

Now, in terms of governance, most participants worked in decentralized health agencies with additional representation from centralized and shared or mixed governance structures.

Participants were geographically distributed across the country, so Northeast, Midwest, South, and the West, which allowed us to capture perspectives from across the country.

But we also considered contextual factors for these communicators, including recognizing their state's political environments, how rural a state is, and the racial and ethnic composition to ensure we were hearing from communicators working in a wide range of settings and circumstances.

Finally, and this is one big one that many of you may be wondering about, but we spoke with communicators working in communications departments of varying sizes. Nearly half of our participants, around 23 in total, were operating as a communications department of one. This is the heart of why PHCC does what it does. It recognizes that a good chunk of our audience is serving as the only communications person for the entire department, and is on task with reaching thousands of people, sometimes millions, with effective health communication. So how can we serve as that helpful extra set of hands to expand their capacity, workforce readiness, and help them do their job most effectively? Alright.

So, when looking at… oops, just gonna click to here… Alright. So after talking with these 50 communicators, we identified 14 distinct factors that communicators consistently said shaped their effectiveness within their public health agency. These 14 factors we identified are displayed on this slide. I'm not going to read through all of them, but I do want to highlight the range. You'll see that they span structural factors, like staffing structure, funding, and bureaucracy, to relational factors, like relationships with leadership, relationships with program staff, relationships with the media. Even looking at environmental factors, such as the political environment.

We also found that each of these factors exists along a spectrum, meaning that having more or less of a given factor can either strengthen a department's ability to communicate effectively, or make the work more challenging. Every comms department sits at different points along each of these spectrums, reflecting the unique context of every health agency. And understanding where your team falls can help you identify practical, realistic strategies for strengthening your communications work. So across each of these different factors and influences, you can really understand and pinpoint, okay, where does my communications team fall? I'll note that there's three key things to keep in mind, when you're looking through this Action Guide. The first is that these factors are interconnected. They influence one another. So, for example, bureaucratic challenges often go hand-in-hand with limited access to leadership.

At the same time, communicators talked about using strengths in one area, like strong relationships, to help offset challenges elsewhere.

Second is that communicators have varying degrees of control over these factors. Some, like the political environment, are largely outside of a team's control. Whereas others, such as relationships with colleagues or leadership, may offer more opportunities for influence, even if they still come with real restraints. And third, the impact of each factor varies by agency.

Now, in some places, politics play a large role in communications decisions, while in others, internal dynamics and relationships matter most.

The big takeaway that I want you to understand from this slide is that understanding which factor matters most in your specific context will help you focus your time and energy when it comes to having the greatest impact.

All right, so we didn't just stop at identifying these 14 factors. What really matters is what you do with them. So because these factors are shared across agencies, they create opportunities, shared opportunities, for action. And you don't have to start from scratch.

That's really what makes this Action Guide not just a research report, but an Action Guide. So for each factor, we highlight practical strategies that communicators are already using to successfully navigate constraints and build on their strengths.

So this guide is really designed to help you move from understanding these factors to taking concrete steps your communications work could use. The Action Guide is also designed to be a choose-your-own-adventure. We suggest that you don't have to read it cover to cover, and you don't need to address every single of the 14 factors. Instead, you can jump in where it makes the most sense for you and your team, focusing on what matters right now. I suggest starting with the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity, or the place where you're feeling the most friction. You can also choose to strengthen what's already working.

Alright. So, before we jump into one of the chapters, I want to talk through how the Action Guide is set up, so that when you go to use it, you'll know exactly how to navigate through it.

The guide opens with what we've just covered, why we created this resource, how the research was conducted, and the key factors that emerged from that work. The core of the guide is organized around the factors themselves, and so each factor has its own chapter, you can see listed here, and every chapter follows the same consistent structure. We start by defining the factor and explaining how it can impact communications, both positively and negatively. And from there, we outline practical tactics to address that factor. These tactics reflect the most common, effective, and creative approaches to communications, or approaches communicators shared with us during those interviews.

Finally, we have each chapter, including a worksheet, designed to help you assess where your department sits along that factor spectrum, and develop an action plan to strengthen your communications work. With that in mind, let's talk about one chapter as an example. One sec, I think the slide's changed a little… changed a little bit. Okay. All right.

So, let's choose strategic authority. This is one of the chapters in the Action Guide, and it's one of the most common and consequential factors communicators raise to us during focus groups. So first, to define what is strategic authority? You may not have heard this term before, but it describes a dynamic many communicators immediately recognize. Strategic authority is the degree to which your communications team has the ability to develop communications from a strategic perspective, rather than a reflexive one. So when this factor is strong, communication is part of an overarching plan with intentional decisions about audiences, messages, messengers, timing, and platforms. When we described this factor to people in those interviews, most communicators immediately recognized what it feels like to have it, and what it feels like when it's missing.

They also shared that strategic authority isn't about individual scale or effort. It's shaped by organizational culture, norms, policies, and where the communications department is positioned within the agency.

Alright, so when communicators have strategic authority, they can do things like this. They can develop communications as part of a broader strategy. They can create cohesive, agency-wide messaging. And they can build a consistent brand, look, and voice across programs.

When strategic authority is strong, communicators are brought in at the beginning of program development, not at the very end. And that makes it possible for communicators to elevate the health agency as a unified, trusted institution, rather than a collection of disconnected programs.

So here's one communicator describing what strategic authority looks like in practice for them. They said, right now, we're building out a suite of key messaging, and the real goal there is so that everyone is speaking with the same voice. So if you're in the field, you're talking about long COVID, you're using the same key messages as the press office is with the media. We try to really centralize our messaging and ensure that there's agency consistency on how we talk about issues.

So this is an example pulled directly from our research around strategic authority, and here are some of the areas and how that's mapped out. Communication is part of the broader strategy. Cohesive, agency-wide, and consistent with brand, look, and feel.

Alright, so on the flip is, alternatively, when strategic authority is limited.

Communicators are often brought in late, asked to produce one-off materials, and expected to just get something out. Does any of this feel familiar? This reactive dynamic reduces effectiveness, it increases frustration, and can take a real toll on a team's morale. Many communicators described feeling like communications was treated as an afterthought, rather than a strategic function of the agency.

Here's what one communicator said to us. They said, "I think comms, for a lot of people, is an afterthought. They say, 'okay, we're going to create this new program.' Yay. And then we get two days before they're going to launch it, and they say, 'oh, how are people going to know about it? I guess we should bring in comms.'"

If this sounds familiar, please drop a note in the chat. I'm so curious to see if anyone else feels this. So, this is a specific example from someone in our research, and this is what happens when strategic authority is not seen as an effective measure, an influence of the success of a communications team or department.

Alright, so we've identified what is strategic authority. Again, we're just zooming in on one chapter in our Action Guide. We defined what it is, what it's not, and what this looks like and how it feels.

So… Ultimately, how do we increase strategic authority? And here's what we are recommending.

Communicators told us that building and maintaining strategic authority is an ongoing process. It depends on both formal supports, like job titles and procedures, and informal supports, such as trust, culture, and leadership. So a few approaches came up again. There's one up here right now, on recognizing that, first, communicators emphasize doing whatever possible, through formal processes or frequent conversation with program staff to ensure communications is brought in early to program development.

Two. Many describe developing a strategic communications plan to organize messaging and create consistency.

And third, creating a communications calendar helped teams anticipate needs and shift work from reactive to more productive, and proactive.

Communicators also emphasize the importance of creating a clear process for how program staff request communication support. Clear procedures help set expectations, reduce last-minute requests, and reinforce communications as a strategic function, not just as a service.

So the fifth item pulled up here is many talked about strengthening relationships with program staff.

Over time, those relationships help shift how programs think about communications from a final step, sorry, advancing here. From a final step to an integrated part of the work. So, points 4 and 5. Developing clear procedures, ensuring you have strong relations with program staff, and finally, communicators stress the value of building strong relationships with agency leaders.

Leadership support can reinforce communications authority internally with programs and externally with partners and stakeholders.

One communicator shared, "the director is able to be an advocate for me. If she's in a meeting that I'm not in, or in a community group that I'm not in, and she hears a communications opportunity, she will tell that staff, 'hey, make sure that you've connected with the comms team about that.' To have her as a champion and as an advocate, I think has been priceless, honestly."

The bulk of this is really to say it's important to remember that not every tactic will be feasible everywhere. And that's totally okay. But the goal is just to focus on what's possible in your context right now.

Alright, finally, you can use this chapter's worksheet to create your own action plan. This worksheet will help you assess your department's current level of strategic authority, identify specific friction points, and choose one or two tactics to try out. This exercise can either be done on your own or with your team. And the worksheets are interactive, so you can record your answers directly and return back to it as much as you would like.

The main takeaway here is that strategic authority isn't something you either have or don't have, it's something that can grow over time. Small shifts, like earlier involvement, clearer processes, stronger relationships, can meaningfully change how communications functions. So, this is just one example of how you can use this Action Guide. We zoomed in for the purposes of this afternoon on strategic authority. But all 14 factors have their own chapter, filled with tactics you can use to improve your communications work.

As we wrap up, I want to leave you with just a few key takeaways before we move into the next phase of our conversation, which is to introduce these incredible panelists that will be joining me for a rich conversation. But, to kind of close out my spiel on the PHCC Action Guide, this Action Guide is grounded in the lived experiences of public health communicators across the country, and it's designed to be practical, flexible, and usable in real-world conditions. You don't need to read it cover to cover, start with the factor that matters most in your context right now, use the worksheet, and try out one realistic tactic. The Action Guide and accompanying worksheets are all available on the PHCC website. Thank you for dropping the link, and we encourage you to download this Action Guide, share it with your colleagues, and return to it over time as your needs and contexts change.

I had someone who recently emailed PHCC and said they printed out the guide, and they put it into a binder, and they've been sharing it with their communications team. So they've been passing it around, making notes, leaving stickies.

This guide is for you, based on lived experiences from your peers across the country. So, we encourage you to use it. And together, through this guide, through this research, through being in space right now with each other, I believe that we can build stronger systems… we can build stronger systems and collaborations to advance our shared mission of protecting and promoting the public's health through effective communication.

So, I leave you before moving into the next phase of our webinar this afternoon with our website. Feel free to reach out to us through our email, info at publichealthcollaborative.org, and give us a follow on LinkedIn.

All right, moving into the panel session, talking with these incredible leaders representing Connecticut, Utah, and the city of Detroit.

First, I want to introduce Luisa Hansen. She's a Public Information Officer within the Utah Department of Health and Human Services. For nearly a decade, she has designed and implemented high-visibility statewide public health communication frameworks that bridge the gap between complex data and accessible community intervention. Luisa co-authored the blueprint for the DHHS Language Access Plan, originating from her MPH capstone research, transforming agency localization workflows while ensuring federal compliance. A Certified Medical and Community Interpreter Trainer, her work centers on building internal capacity to dismantle systemic information barriers to protect underserved populations. Luisa's background spans maternal health, crisis comms, and legislative advocacy, including securing permanent funding increases for state-mandated public health projects. That's awesome. She holds a Master's of Public Health from Utah State University.

Maura Fitzgerald is the Chief Marketing Officer for the Connecticut Department of Public Health, where she oversees the agency's marketing strategy, statewide health messaging, and communications infrastructure. Maura brings more than 25 years of experience across government, politics, and the private sector. She has led public health campaigns on some of the hardest topics in public health. This includes vaccine hesitancy, lead poisoning prevention, disease outbreaks, and emergency prep. She holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Connecticut, and a Master of Science in Organizational Leadership from Goodwin University.

Our last panelist is Christina Floyd, so excited to introduce. A Detroit native, she was appointed as the Deputy Director of Public Health for the City of Detroit's Health Department in February of 2022. She assists the Chief Public Health Officer in leading a team of over 280 public health and healthcare professionals who protect and promote the safety, health, and well-being of Detroiters. Prior to her role at Detroit's Health Department, Christina was the Health Director and Chief Public Health Officer for the Fort Mojave Indian Health Center, and also previously served as Director for the Gila River Indian Community Tribal Health Department. Christina earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan at Dearborn, and a Master of Public Health from Des Moines University.

Maura, Christina, Louisa, I'm so excited to be in space with you all today. I wanted to first, kick off today's panel discussion with this first question. Either of you can jump first, but the question is, like, can you walk us through a specific communications effort your team implemented using PHIG funding or other funding? And what were you aiming to improve or achieve?

CHRISTINA FLOYD:

Thank you, Amanda. I'll go first, and I'll be quick, because it is a very long conversation to have on this one. But, last year, in February, we had an emergency with our southwest, region of Detroit, where our Latino population were underwater with a water main break and sub-zero weather. Our communications team, as well as our emergency preparedness team, really came together with our PHIG dollars, to support the work that we were able to accomplish to get residents, three things, really. One, resources that they needed, especially in this over 143 days that we had the PHOC activated, and this emergency went on. And so, one, we made sure that our communications were very solid with, the community to know where to go to get the resource that they needed. Two, if they were displaced, how they were going to get to and from their locations. Then also, three, we really made sure that they… they had communication constantly throughout this entire time. And so, working with the mayor's office, to ensure that, just like you had said, there was really a unified communication, to the community. It wasn't just from the health department and then only from the mayor's office. We really, came together to make sure that any of the community communications that went out, either via social media, news, print material, and even through our translation services. Those were all a unified conversation with the community and one voice, one sound.

AMANDA KWONG:
Thank you.

MAURA FITZGERALD:
Well, I can give you one quick one. We have been trying to, improve our communications with the public, and kind of get the commissioner out more, and out in front of people, so we actually utilized, funding that we received from the CDC for H5N1, but we used it to purchase, equipment for a, a podcast studio. And just within the last 3 weeks, we've launched a new podcast called Connecticut's Health Report. It's just, like, quick 15-minute little, interviews, basically. Our public information officer is a former TV reporter, so she is the host of the program, and she, so far, has interviewed, the commissioner on a bunch of different topics. We just did one, I think, that dropped today on hantavirus. We're probably going to be doing one soon on Ebola, but just all different types of issues, and also on general public health, like, what is public health? So trying to, you know, educate the public on what actually public health is and what it does in your daily lives.

So, we're doing that. We're going to be bringing in some guests on different podcasts, but, that's one way that we have used some of our funding to do, you know, some innovative things.

KWONG:
Awesome, thanks for sharing. Yeah.

LUISA HANSEN:
Yeah, I was just going to say that I can also offer, you know, an example. So, with PHIG funding, to be, we started to, beginning… when we first got the funding, we decided we needed a strategic communications plan, and also a master calendar. And so, the presentation totally spoke to what our team has been doing, because, we… we came to the same conclusions.

That we needed to… to have, a structured communications plan, that had, obviously, a master calendar template, so we could start being a little more strategic rather than reactive. And one of our challenging, communications efforts is always around our family and child services. And so, one example, we knew that that area needed a lot of work, just because we are constantly highlighted in the media, usually when there is, like, a tragedy or something that is happening, but we have also a whole section of preventive efforts that seem to be ignored, or people don't know about. So, for… One of our priorities in our plan was that, we were going to take advantage of here in Utah, we have what is called Family Strengthening Month, and that usually starts from Mother's Day ending on Father's Day, and that's the month. It crosses, you know, from May to June, and basically we implemented a coordinated campaign that is called Family Connection Week. It usually takes place on the first week of June, and our objective was to, you know, develop a narrative that surrounded family… surrounding family dynamics, addressing, common concerns such as the screen time, mental health.

All these issues that families are usually, having a hard time, like, dealing with in their own homes, because parents don't know how to approach those, and especially how to connect with their children as they are changing, right? As they are transitioning from being children to being, like, little adults.

And trying to work those dynamics, so we… we knew that, just from surveys that we did with parents, we knew that there was, like, the kids think one thing, that the parents think others, and… and so we knew that that was a specific time where we could really focus on connection, and we also could, also promote all our preventive services that we have here at the agency. And so, what we did is that we just went to the top. We started to collaborate with the Utah Office of Families, which is right under the governor's office.

And we created a script for them, so we could produce, like, a video coming from the governor's office, you know, promoting, this initiative.

We also set up a digital structure where we develop a dedicated website about these preventive messages. It's called Strong Families at Utah.Gov, and it features a curated list of, you know, screen-free family activities, and also some fact sheets about, you know, what parents need to know, how can they interact with their children, how can they learn about those early interactions and how those will have an impact in the future, of these kids.

We secure, you know, broadcast television featuring, like, different pitches that we develop. We partner with local leaders, so they could, instead of being us delivering those messages, they could deliver these messages that are being broadcasted, you know, across channel TV, sorry, the different connected TV, regular TV, radio, etc.

We also reached out to our partners, which is our local health departments and the local implementing authorities, mental health authorities, so that, you know, we could find out what their specific needs when they are working with families, so we could create toolkits for them and resources that were specific to to their audience, because we have, you know, like, most of the services are in the Wasatch Front, which is, you know, the urban area of Utah, but then we have, like, the majority of our local health departments are in very rural areas where access to services is very limited, so sometimes they need a little more support. And, you know, this initiative really, last year resulted in this multi-channel footprint, and that set kind of like an expectation, and we're doing it again this year, we're very excited. It's really expanded.

Lots of people have heard about it, and they want to be part of the website, even the maintenance has been a little easier for us, because we are having partners reaching out to us and letting us know what things that they have that perhaps have a connection with what we're doing, and we just add them. So, even us having to maintain that page, it kind of comes, like, it's very organic, so… That's just one of the examples.

KWONG:
Fantastic. So much good there. Thank you. Just to… it's incredible what all three of you are doing at the local and state and city level. Just to kind of recap what I was hearing was the role of awareness as a technique, as part of public health communications, is it awareness of key messages and resources, but also driving awareness of what more you mentioned around defining what is public health, helping people understand what public health looks like in their day-to-day, that is so important before we dive into, like, how to get people on board to understand a health topic, is first understand, like, what is public health? Clean air, clean water, access to those structures. So I just love that what you all lifted up is the idea of driving awareness around what is public health, specific resources, and keeping things coordinated and simplified. Kind of, Christina, what you were mentioning.

I loved hearing the different kinds of approaches and channel strategies, Luisa, you had mentioned. Maura, you brought up some new type of content formats, like podcasts. There's so many ways to get the message out, and with podcasts, you know, highlighting different leadership, the role of how can we increase visibility of our health commissioner to the everyday general public, like, that is powerful. So, so much great work that you all are doing, and was happy to see that the work you're doing is so resonant, and what we heard from our 50-plus people that were part of these interviews is strategy should be there at the very beginning, and should not be an afterthought. And so, just thank you for all your advocacy work, for doing this for your communities.

I want to kind of shift gears a little bit to be thinking about the role of, like, leadership and decision makers. I'm curious to understand, like, how are you demonstrating this impact of your communications efforts to leadership or decision makers? Like, what additional support would you need to tell the story more effectively?

FLOYD:
I think here at the health department, we are… we're really posed because we have a new leader, as well as a new administration for both the city as well as the department, who took the approach of health in all policies and public health at the forefront. And so, it's not, like a teeth pull for us to be able to say, here, look at us.

It's really… now you're at the forefront, and so, I think for, our department, it's really, allowing the creativity of our staff to be able to now come out and be more, not just, you know, in the background, but in internal, external, and then more working with our other key departments and organizations and critical partnerships. So, the good thing is, and not to say that there won't be any challenges, but we are really going to be driven by public health communications, as we've been told numerous times coming in, that communications is very critical, and public health communications will not be silent in the department, and so we take that in stride.

FITZGERALD:
Yeah, in Connecticut, we do a bunch of different things. For us internally, with our leadership, my team meets with the commissioner twice a month, and we utilize tools like Hootsuite. We just started with them, about a month or so ago, but we now have all of our social media linked through Hootsuite, which is a very robust platform. We can schedule everything in there, but then it also gives us tons of metrics so the commissioner can see, you know, what's working, what's not working, so can we, so we can kind of drive our content to where, where things are working.

We also have dashboards that we utilize on Monday.com to keep track of all of our marketing projects, so that we can see where everything is in the pipeline, and she can also see where everything is in the pipeline. And then, just in general for the agency itself and the work that the agency is doing.

We have on our staff a graphic designer, which has just been awesome. So, she works with all of the various programs in the agency, so, you know, we recently, our workforce development office had to do a report that needed to go to the legislature, and, you know, rather than it being a, you know, five-page written report, they went through it with her, and she turned it into a two-page infographic report. And our government relations people got feedback from the legislature that they really… that, you know, that was the first time they'd ever seen something like that, and they actually took the time to look at it and read it. So, we in our communications office are very focused on making the communications that come out and highlighting the achievements of the office.

But in… in normal person speak. You know, I have… my staff, I think, is about 5 people, and there's only one person on my staff who has an MPH. The rest of us are not from the public health world, so it comes in very handy when we are trying to, you know, explain for the public and for the legislature and for others, you know, what public health is doing.

HANSEN:
I will agree with… yeah, I will agree with both of you that, having your commissioner and our office… it's a big agency here, the Department of Health and Human Services, and so we have, under the Commissioner, various deputies, and I know that we have weekly briefings with them. We don't necessarily create that many reports, just because they are overwhelmed already with a lot of reports, but I think the weekly briefings are really useful for them. They, especially our commissioner, she is very involved in all the communication. She always wants to know, and that is actually very useful to keep her in the loop.

Because, we are also in constant coordination with our local health departments and also our government, communicators, so all the agencies' communicators we meet, weekly, and you know, and they participate in various meetings where they are always coordinating, so… Having our commissioner know what's happening on our agency as far as communications, it really helps her also make those connections with other, state agencies and other meetings that she's involved. I know that she appreciates it, and for us, being positioned where we're at, so close to the Commissioner, I think that is key. If a communications team is not under… at least… sometimes you cannot be directly under the Commissioner, but if you are at least somewhat close to the deputies, like, that is probably the best way that a team can… especially a communications team can be placed, because you need to have that involvement, especially if you want to you know, like, coordinate with… at the highest level at your state. Like, us, like, we coordinate with the governor's office all the time, but we have a very close relationship with his communication team.

KWONG:
It's such a good point, is the proximity that your communications staff and team have to the health commissioner. It's… I heard all of that in what you three have raised. I heard, like, how can we get creative in terms of partnership, outside of our own communications team, thinking about partnering with, like, the media team more closely, or the program team? And thank you, Maura, for bringing those really practical examples of, like, how to show and highlight impact. Through digital analytics with Hootsuite, to performance dashboards with Monday.com. There's these great platforms for project management that also have this really cool analytics feature, which I'm learning for the first time. I use Monday.com, but didn't know there was a whole dashboard feature, so I'm definitely taking this as a notebook to my work, but, thank you all so much for raising up those specific examples of how to highlight impacts, but also the role of close proximity to a health commissioner, to strengthen communications, advocacy, and, and support.

Before I move into the last phase of our time together when I'm going to kick it back to O’Keyla. I have one final question for you all, and it is: what challenges have you encountered in building or sustaining communications capacity? And what lessons would you share with our group here?

FITZGERALD:
One of the biggest challenges that… well, one of the biggest challenges that we've had is, is hiring, you know, and kind of… funding and hiring, and one of the tools that we use quite frequently now is the CDC Foundation. So we're kind of able to get around our state's hiring restrictions and, you know, the hiring process, which can take anywhere from 6 months to a year. By going through the CDC Foundation, I have… 3… people on my, you know, 6 or 7-person staff that are CDC Foundation employees, and you know, we were able to get them in the door and working, you know, within, like, a month of identifying each of them. So, that has been hugely helpful. And the other kind of lesson and takeaway that I would have, that I wanted to share is just the use of AI. I've been using it quite frequently here, and it's come in very handy. I recently created my, my own, GPT that I called a Video Script Assistant, because we were working with an outside marketing firm to create a series of schoolhouse rock-style videos on vaccines, and so I fed into the GPT a bunch of research from organizations like Your Local Epidemiologist and other firms that had done research on vaccine hesitancy. So I fed all of that information into the AI, and then used it kind of as a focus group to focus group the lyrics of the songs that our group and the firm had come up with.

And had it kind of analyzed that through the lens of a, you know, a 32-year-old mother of two with two children under the age of 12 who was vaccine questioning, and it picked out, you know, words and phrases that could be problematic, and offered solutions to change them around. So we've really used AI to kind of make sure that we're not just messaging to ourselves. You know, messages that we come up with sound great to us but not necessarily maybe to the people that we're actually trying to reach. So we use AI as kind of like a, you know, a no-cost focus group, to focus group the messaging that we have to make sure that we're putting out there information that the people that we need to pick that information up actually do pick it up.

FLOYD:
I would say almost the same thing applies here at the Health Department for Detroit. We… we need to be able to get out of our own way and not preach to the choir, which public health does. Public Health does that very well, to make sure that we… we're validating ourselves, right? And so, now we are now charged with, not just, sitting and churching the church, as they would say, but really getting out and being more, community-driven, with obviously being data-driven, but having more situational awareness about what the community is really asking for, what they're looking for, and how they want their messaging as well. So, again, like I said, we, we have a really enthusiastic new Chief Public Health Officer who takes the helm of that and literally just said, communications will be mine, and we'll show you how to do it. And so I would say, you know, one of the challenges, as most public health would, is to come out of its own shell. And so, how we're coming out of our own shell is really being able to, you know, embrace various forms, we haven't really gotten into AI just yet, but various forms of communication and how we can message better, to the community. But, finally, I would suggest as well, as Maura just said, staffing. And so, one of the ways we would look at how we can, you know, build on sustainability, is looking at, the threading of other funding. And so, yes, we have staff that are on, PHIG who are, highly and just great with the work that they do, but there is that realization that, you know, there may be an end date, and so how can we thread, the various funding sources that we have to continue to sustain those staff members so that, that work can continue on, and we keep the work that we're trying to start to reoccur and redo?

HANSEN:
Yes, I agree with everything everyone has said. It's so relatable, and I think for us, you know, like, when we started to build our strategic communications plan, we were also convinced that we were, we needed to conduct a public trust survey, because we really needed to know, our baseline, especially post-pandemic, where we were, especially with a recently merged agency. We used to be just the Department of Health, and then Health and Human Services, merged, like, just right after, COVID, and… and so we knew that we really didn't know too much about, you know, What was the public perception? So, building a sustained public health communications capacity, highlighted some of those institutional obstacles, such as, like, knowing that there was a trust gap, and knowing also being, like, very aware that we have complex ecosystems, and… and that those are hard to navigate for everyone.

We also knew that we need to combat negative media bias. Like I mentioned earlier, you know, we had kind of a bad reputation for our Division of Child and Family Services, because they get featured in the news in a bad light all the time. And you know, ignoring, our preventive efforts. And… and also, we realized that, staff, especially coming out of, of the work of a pandemic, like, there was a lot of, like, need for, like, regrouping and kind of, like, start assessing, you know, like, also the internal needs, because we see every, at least our department, communications department, we know that every employee is a potential ambassador for DHHS, and if the morale is low that doesn't help, right? Whatever we're doing with our campaigns or any communications efforts, like, we need our employees to to… to be 100%, you know, on our side first, so they can continue to spread the message, so… I think the overarching lesson that we… that we have learned, through all our processes is that we need to start humanizing state workers, you know, to… to bridge that trust gap.

And so we have focused on authentic, personal, light-hearted content that, you know, we… we try to interview our frontline employees, try to show behind the scenes, stories, that we do by inviting the media to come and kind of see what's the work that happens behind the scenes, and people might not be aware of. And that approach in our strategic communications have really helped not only understand our processes and how we're trying to remove certain barriers, but also to… to… cuts us some slack, to show them that behind the bureaucracy, behind this image of a big, of the largest state agency, like, there's a lot of people doing a lot of work, and we're trying our best, and also trying to show our employees the same thing, right? That leadership has their best interest at hand, and we're trying to bridge that gap.

KWONG:
Thank you. Thank you all so much for… for providing insight there around what challenges you've encountered around building and sustaining communications. A lot of great insights. Maura, Christina, Luisa, thank you so much. I will kick this last piece of our time together over to O’Keyla.

COOPER:
Yeah, sure, thank you all so much. Really appreciate you guys sharing those real-world insights and very incredible conversations, so thank you for sharing so openly with us. We're now going to move to the Q&A portion of today's session. The chat has been disabled, but you are able to submit questions, via the Q&A box, so I'm just gonna… Go ahead, because we have some questions here, and we only have a few minutes. I'll start with this first one, and it looks like it might be directed to you, Amanda. Is there a section in the guide that outlines how internal teams request marketing collateral from the Public Information Office, including how those requests are processed and tracked?

KWONG:
This is a great question. Off the top of my head, from the chapters we have and worksheets and insights, I… I have to dig. If the person who… how about, could you send my email afterwards, and I can, like, take this offline, because I want to make sure I give the person the right answer, but I don't recall if there is something as specific as this, but certainly can fill up their email.

COOPER:
Yeah, maybe we can drop your email address in the chat, and folks who have additional questions on the guide can follow up there.

Let me get to this one. This is a pretty interesting one, I've also seen this, but there are several parks that leverage TikTok to gain exposure, and I think now would be a perfect time to create TikToks around hantavirus and Ebola, and maybe recruit graduate interns if funding is not available. Is anyone on the panel leveraging TikTok more at this time?

FLOYD:
Yes. And we have thousands of interns.

So, especially this summer, there are probably some that are working on communications in those projects, but we definitely started using TikTok last year, and we are now more than ever going to be starting to use it, this year in hantavirus, as well as Ebola and a few others, are gonna be really key ones that we're gonna focus in on.

COOPER:
Oh, that's great. I haven't heard of a lot of folks using TikTok in the industry, but what about anyone else?

FITZGERALD:
We have not started using TikTok yet, but I'm, like, dying to use it, even though I don't go on the platform myself. We have two interns that are starting in just a couple of weeks, so they are gonna be put on that detail. And I also, through the CDC Foundation, thank God, have a young, college graduate who is going to be starting with us within the next couple of weeks, and she is going to be kind of like our social media mechanic.

But she's gonna be tasked with, working with those interns to kind of set up our TikTok account, and she's also, you know, her big thing is going to be kind of going out there and seeing what the, you know, what's trending these days, and what we can, you know, use out in the… in the popular zeitgeist that we can, craft some public health messages off of for TikTok and other platforms.

COOPER:
That's pretty awesome. That's the perfect demographic to kind of kick that off. They know exactly how to leverage that platform, so it'll be interesting to see, more of that as that becomes more popular with agencies.

Another question we have is, is the AI use in place of community partner material review of your products? I don't know if I'm reading that right. We were just talking about AI. Is the AI use in place of community partner material review of your products? Okay. I don't know who that was that was mentioning the use of AI. Was that you, Maura?

FITZGERALD:
Yes, that was me.

I'm not quite sure I actually… I fully understand the question, but we run a lot of our… I run a lot of our materials through AI, so even, like, posters. I will run through AI to see if the wording in the posters is kind of gonna jive with, you know, what people are gonna respond to. And it's just a much more cost-effective and speedy way to get input as opposed to, you know, paying for a focus group, or going and talking to community partners. But we also are doing a lot of outreach to our local health departments and getting feedback from them on our materials, and getting feedback from them on materials that they need from us. So, we are engaging where we can, but, you know, a lot of times there just isn't the time to kind of go out and cast a wide net and talk to a bunch of different people about how our materials are going to land.

COOPER:
Absolutely. And if the person who wrote that question, if you have follow-up to that, if you wanted a different perspective, please feel free to drop another question in the Q&A. I'll go on to another one. What are some of the items for the folks using Monday.com, what are some of the items you are tracking on the Monday.com dashboards? Anyone. And anyone can answer.

FITZGERALD:
We… we actually… so, we are now using Monday, we just created a form, and I think it goes kind of to the first question that was asked. We just created a form through Monday that will go to all of our programs when they need anything from our communications office. So, whether it's, you know, hey, we have X commemorative month coming up, and we would like some social media posts, they fill out that form, and it gets all populated into Monday for us. They can also use that form when they need, you know, posters, or brochures, or any other kind of marketing materials, so we're using Monday for that. I also use Monday to track all of our work with outside marketing firms, so all of their plans, their budget, all of that is tracked in Monday.

COOPER:
Excellent. One more question before we end, and Amanda, this might be for you and for, Antonio, who dropped this question in. It may be also another follow-up question, but is there a specific chapter in the guide that is particularly practical and serves as a good starting point for departments that have not done extensive work in the comms area?

KWONG:
Yes, there's one chapter on, like, communication structure. I feel like that's a good one to jump into first, but take a look at, the appendix. It's either communication structure or comms support, but that is the one that I feel like, from their vantage point and what they're looking to dive into, would be a great place to start.

COOPER:
All right, well, excellent. We're gonna wrap up this Q&A section. If you have more questions for Amanda, I think we dropped her email in the chat, and if you have additional questions for our panelists, you can feel free to send it to any of us. Maybe we can drop one of our emails in the chats as well for folks who want to follow up, and we can get answers on those.

We're wrapping up, but we have an evaluation for this webinar on the screen. If you can just scan the QR code or click the link in the chat, and answer that evaluation for us, we would be very grateful. Thank you all for your engagement and participation today.

As a couple of quick reminders, we will be recording, and following up after the webinar, and we hope that you all have a really good day. Thank you so much for joining.

KWONG:
Thank you all.

FLOYD:
Thank you.