First published on June 1, 2015 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Carol Bryant was on the ground floor of the USF College of Public Health’s social marketing program when the social marketing field was in its infancy.  She credits Dr. Stan Graven, chair of the Department of Community and Family Health at the time, for the idea of a social marketing conference.

“He asked me to start a conference,” Bryant said.  “He said, ‘I think the field of social marketing has enough popularity and potential.  We need a conference on it.’”

Dr. Carol Bryant

Bryant, now USF Distinguished Health Professor in Community and Family Health, believes Graven’s own conference had convinced him of the viability of conferences in general, and specifically their ability to facilitate broad networking among stakeholders in any given field.

“It’s had a really major impact on his field,” Bryant said of what has become known as the Gravens conference, “so he could see that a conference in social marketing might be able to do the same thing.  He realized that a national conference could bring people together, disseminate the ideas, make a significant contribution to the public health community, and probably be good for branding USF.”

Bryant assented despite never having done anything of the kind or having any real idea of how to go about it.

She enlisted the help of Judy Sommers, who was at that time in charge of organizing COPH events.  She traveled to the nation’s capital to consult with two people at CDC who were well known in social marketing to ask whom to invite to speak.  She even began to think that putting a conference together might not be so difficult, after all.

“We had a really dynamic lineup of all the really active social marketers in the United States,” she said.  “We paid them all for their travel and a pretty good honorarium to come.  We promoted the conference, and we had 71 people.”

So far, so good.  There was just one problem.

“Forty or 50 of them were speakers,” she recalled, “so we lost a bundle of money.”

Bryant concluded then that the inaugural social marketing conference would also be the last, but she had a believer in Graven.

“Stan had the vision and courage to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to do it again.  Only this time, we’re not going to lose money, so let’s see how we can cut back on the budget and do better promotion.’”

Flanked by a cadre of congratulatory colleagues, Bryant (center) received a special recognition they presented her at the 2014 Social Marketing Conference.

The result was a second conference that turned the tide.  Smaller honoraria and fewer speakers fixed the early financial faux pas, along with the discovery within a few years that the honoraria could be dropped altogether.  There was enough interest in social marketing and enough respect for the conference that speakers would pay their own way to take part, and holding it at a beachfront resort didn’t hurt.

“Stan was absolutely right,” Bryant said.  “The conference would take the approach of social marketing and disseminate it in a way we couldn’t just through publications and my flying around and talking about it.”

Still, she said, social marketing’s early days at USF were lean at best.

“The early days were real tough financially,” she said.  “I was pretty terrified, actually, about how to do something like this.  Fortunately, we had good people – first Judy Sommers and then Ginger Phillips, and now Bobbi Rose – to do all the conference planning, but I didn’t realize I could just sit back and let them do that.  In the first years, I felt like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to learn how to do this.’”

In those early years, the Social Marketing Conference, the first of its kind anywhere, was pretty much the extent of social marketing, said Bryant, who also co-directs the Florida Prevention Research Center, a CDC-funded entity that develops and evaluates a community-based approach to social marketing.

“We did not have what we came to call the training academy yet, or the field school,” she said.  “I think I was teaching an Introduction to Social Marketing course at that time.”

Persistence pays

Bryant’s long-time social marketing partner is also her long-time partner in the bigger sense, her husband, James Lindenberger, director and faculty administrator of the Social Marketing Group.  When social marketing was launched at COPH, Lindenberger was not yet at USF, but was nonetheless a major catalyst in the start of social marketing at the university.  Together, he and Bryant founded Best Start Social Marketing, a nonprofit marketing agency with an innately symbiotic relationship with social marketing at USF.  Lindenberger was its executive director for its first 15 years.  He also is founder and former publisher of Social Marketing Quarterly, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to social marketing.

James Lindenberger

“Much of the work that we did, whether at our agency or at USF, was really done collaboratively between the two,” Lindenberger recalled.  While agreeing that the Social Marketing Conference drove at least the USF entry into the field, and probably more, he shared Bryant’s recollection of a shaky start.

“It was the first conference we’d ever put on,” he said.  “We didn’t know what we were doing, exactly, but we did have a lot of people who were instrumental in the field of social marketing, which was still a very young discipline.  We had a lot of what we thought were the important folks in the field do the presentations.”

One of those people, Lindenberger said, was Alan Andreasen, now a marketing professor at Georgetown University and executive director of the Social Marketing Institute.

“We asked him to be the closing speaker and add an exclamation point to the conference,” Lindenberger said.  “So, after a day-and-a-half of presentations, Alan got up and said, ‘Well, I want to tell you all that none of you know what social marketing is.  You’re completely wrong.’  He then proceeded to spend about 35 or 40 minutes telling us how much we had messed up.”

Lindenberger and Bryant at the recent COPH Alumni Awards

Bryant and Lindenberger laughed heartily as they recalled the incident, but said they were far from finding it amusing at the time.

“We were furious.  You left the room,” Lindenberger said, nodding to Bryant, who agreed.

“I got up,” she said, “and was just pacing in the hallway thinking, ‘I can’t take this.’”

“We were really furious,” Lindenberger continued, “because this is a guy who was really important, and a lot of people looked to him, and we wanted him to come in and say, ‘Bless you.  Thank you for doing this.  Nobody else has done it before.  We appreciate it.’  Instead, he got up and basically said, ‘You idiots.’

“After a few weeks of us getting through this, it dawned on us that he was right.  His concern was that we had had almost all communications presentations.  Almost everything we talked about was promotion.  He said, ‘That’s not what we’re about.  We aren’t advertisers, we’re marketers, and marketers do a complete and holistic look at solving problems and apply those different variables to the solutions.’”

What resulted, Lindenberger said, was a dramatic redesign of the conference for the following year.

Holding a conference at a seaside resort is a good thing, as the faces of Social Marketing Conference attendees show.

“It’s been interesting,” Bryant noted.  “That mistake was made by almost everyone we invited.  They showed off all their promotional materials and were very proud to do so, and we still have trouble with trying to make sure people don’t do that, and that our audience understands that it isn’t just advertising.

“It’s very humbling that people can sit there for two days having us tell them that maybe 20 times and still try to hire us to do TV ads.  I think it’s because most people think marketing is advertising.  It’s a hard misunderstanding to correct.”

In fact, both said the term “social marketing” has long been problematic.  Technology, it might seem, is doing all it can to keep it that way.

“It’s interesting,” Bryant said.  “It’s changed from ‘Don’t call it that, because marketing is evil’ or ‘Don’t call it social marketing, because that’s social engineering.’  Now, it’s a different debate.”

“A lot of the debate,” Lindenberger said, “seems to be rooted in younger folks coming into the field who do want to be social marketers, but when they present themselves as social marketers to their peers, their bosses or their clients, those people misinterpret that to mean social media and social media marketing.  Their concern is that it’s diminishing their ability to have an impact and also diminishing their ability to have a successful career.”

“For many of us who are kind of the old guard on this,” he continued, “our belief is there’s just so much brand equity built into it.  There’s a huge array of publications and organizations and conferences that are built around social marketing.  We would have another 30 years of building the brand up.”

“But we already have lost a lot of brand equity,” Bryant countered.  “If you Google ‘social marketing,’ you’ll get social media, even social media marketing conferences.  It is a real problem.

“In the U.S. public health system, and certainly within anthropology, it was seen as advertising and manipulation,” added Bryant, an anthropologist by training.  “I had anthropology friends who just thought I had gone totally to the dark side, but public health had a real misunderstanding about it, too, until people like Marsha Walker in Texas got it right and funded a really successful program.  That program was so successful that soon, the other agencies were asking us to do projects for them.  So, as they saw it work in this country, people in public health went, ‘Wait a minute.  Whatever it’s called, this might work for us.”

“I think what happened here at USF is a very significant part of why the discipline grew as rapidly and as successfully as it did,” Lindenberger said.  “A national program that we did out of USF and Best Start was the national breastfeeding promotion campaign for the Department of Agriculture.  That became their national brand.  It’s been used in every state in the country, is still being used, and that really brought social marketing to the foreground in Washington in a way domestically that it had never been before.”

Throw me a line

That early show of strength by the program also was a very early sign of things to come for the field, “upstream” social marketing, an approach that wouldn’t have a name for many years.

“Downstream is basically going to the individual or small group to influence their behaviors to be more positive in a particular issue, health issue or whatever it may be,” Lindenberger explained.  “Upstream is trying to look at the environment, decision-makers and the other factors that actually create a situation in which people can make change more effectively and more usefully.”

“All these people are drowning in the river downstream,” Bryant offered by way of the prevailing example in the field.  “So, you throw them educational pamphlets on how to swim or pull them out one at a time.  But upstream says, ‘No, let’s find out where they’re coming from.  Is there a bridge that’s broken?  Is something giving way?  Let’s go up there and keep them getting into the river in the beginning, instead of one by one educating them on how to survive.’  It’s a powerful metaphor, and it is catching on.”

Lindenberger noted that early applications of upstream social marketing significantly predate the metaphor.  While the national breastfeeding campaign was being developed in 1989, he said, Bryant and a pair of colleagues went to Capitol Hill and lobbied Congress for funding.

Social marketing at work at the Social Marketing Conference

“It had never been done before,” Lindenberger said, “and after that lobbying effort, $8-million was set aside specifically for breastfeeding promotion and management to be dispersed throughout the country in the WIC program.  That was upstream.  The very first project we ever did was as upstream as it gets.”

Bryant credits Andreasen for helping to widely disseminate the metaphoric term – source unknown – that has become a directional imperative for social marketing over the past decade, as well as numerous others for driving it forward.

“Many speakers at our conference, Bill Smith and Gerard Hastings from Scotland, especially, brought that metaphor alive for us and nudged us to go more upstream,” Bryant said, “and then our critics like Larry Wallach were saying the same thing,” which was that the downstream approach was blaming the victims, chiding them for not knowing how to swim well enough to save themselves.

“All those forces came together at the same time, and public health had the same realization.  We said, ‘Wait a minute.  We’d be really stupid to keep going downstream.  Let’s come up with a model that takes social marketing upstream,’ so that’s what we’ve done for the last 10 years – develop the model and test it out, and now, we’re training people in it.

“I’m hoping it will really take off.  It is more difficult to get funding, but it is more sustainable, too.”

This year, social marketing at USF COPH added to its impressive list of accolades the nation’s first MPH with a social marketing concentration.  Last year, the program celebrated the revision and re-launch of its social marketing training web site in conjunction with the Florida Prevention Research Center.  There is excitement over the field’s burgeoning relationships with other disciplines, namely engineering (humanitarian engineers) and a long-standing but still growing symbiosis with anthropology.  There also is that strengthening upstream trend.

Which way do we go?

But with all its successes, expansion, diversification and partnering, social marketing nonetheless remains a relatively new field in a time when a digital communications explosion can threaten to turn almost anything into a shape-shifter.  While few would argue that 44 successful years likely points toward anything less than a positive future, identifying potential threats can hardly be seen as unwise.

So, just where is social marketing headed?  In arguably its adolescence, what will it look like fully grown?  Who better to ask than two people who have nurtured it from infancy?

“I see a lot of dangers ahead,” Bryant said, “the big one being the brand equity diminishing because of confusion with social media marketing, and I’m not sure where I stand on the argument.  But I’m at this point kind of leaning toward maybe we do change our name, or do a qualification to it, ‘social marketing for behavior change,’ or something like that to help clarify that we’re not social media.

“Like anything, it peaks and then it falls,” she said, “and I resisted doing an MPH in social marketing, because I was afraid it was just an approach and its popularity might wane, and people with that degree – other people wouldn’t even know what they did.  I think those are some dangers that are real, but there are now so many people active in the field around the world.  We have two list serves, two journals, two conferences, and we’re thousands strong instead of just a hundred, so I think those fears are probably not warranted.”

“I agree with that,” Lindenberger offered.  “They’re not warranted.  We differ over the name issue and social media marketing.  I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that people sometimes get confused, and we can help them learn more about it if we have the chance to engage them.  And I also don’t really care.  I think we and other social marketers continue to do what we do, and if we do it well, if we produce the product successfully and deliver something to their audiences that they really need and want that will help them accomplish their own missions, then we’re fine.”

After discussing the future they anticipate for social marketing, it was time to consider the one they’d like to see.

A student poster presentation at the conference

“Something I think will happen – we’re already seeing it – that I would like more of is social marketing moving out of public health,” Bryant said.  “I think our conference taught people in public health how to apply social marketing.  Only more recently have we attracted people from other fields and changed our name from Social Marketing in Public Health to just Social Marketing Conference.

“It since then has also taken off in environmental protection.  A man named Doug McKenzie Moore, who’s a good trainer and has a wonderful web site and a list serve, has really spread it around the world for people who are working in recycling and all kinds of things.  We’re working with Qatar now to do the same thing in transportation.  Some social marketers want to see it in finance helping people to manage their finances better.

“So, what I’m hoping happens is it really does move out of just public health applications, because it could work so well in other arenas.  Healthy People 2020 has a set of objectives related to social marketing, and they want to see, by 2020, more health departments using social marketing.  I’d like to see state health departments really use it.  And the other set of objectives in Healthy People 2020 is that all schools of public health will offer at least a course in social marketing.”

“I’d like to see it be a degree program in a lot of universities around the country,” Lindenberger said.  “I think that would be a way for this to really take off – that people see it as a legitimate credential that helps them get jobs and provides them with tools to be able to influence positive change.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

The post Pioneers of social marketing discuss its founding and its future appeared first on College of Public Health News.

The USF College of Public Health (COPH) welcomed master’s and doctoral  students to a graduation ceremony presented at the college (and also livestreamed here) to family, friends, students, faculty and staff on Aug. 5.

Dr. Tricia Penniecook, COPH associate professor and vice dean for faculty affairs and development, began the ceremony what public health can do for the graduates and how it’ll change them for the rest of their lives. 

“What happens to the people who come through our halls and study to become a public health professional?” Penniecook said. “They change their world view from looking at an individual to viewing the community as a whole. Next, they start challenging their purpose. What are students going to do now that their world view has changed? Next is a change in lifestyle. Everything they do will start connecting with what they have learned in public health. Lastly, they will realize how important building relationships, support and credibility will be with their communities moving forward.”

Every year, the COPH Excellence in Teaching awardee offers words of encouragement to the graduating class. This year’s speaker was Patrick Rodriguez, instructor I.

“As you enter this next phase of your lives, we encourage you to remember the importance of being a lifelong learner. The field of public health is constantly evolving, and it is essential to stay up to date with the latest research, technologies and best practices,” he said. “We also encourage you to embrace diversity and inclusivity in your work, recognizing that health equity cannot be achieved without addressing the root causes of social and economic disparities.”

Dr. Janice Zgibor, professor and associate dean for academic affairs, rounded out the ceremony, presenting the Class of 2023 with their degrees and class gifts.

“I’m so proud of the accomplishments that you have made. It’s taken some time, but you did it. I had the privilege of reading all of your projects and you have made an impact on public health today as we speak,” Zgibor said.

While the graduate student ceremony was underway, the undergraduate studies team celebrated BSHS and BSPH graduates with a stop-in photo booth session before the USF Health ceremony at the USF Yuengling Center.

This semester, 263 undergraduates, 84 master’s degree and 12 doctoral students graduated and entered the public health profession.

Here are some of the stories from the Class of 2023:

Epiphany Jordan, MPH in social marketing

Epiphany Jordan is a multitalented professional from Nevada who said the COPH’s online MPH program with a concentration in social marketing made her feel like she’s graduating with three degrees.

It had been decades since the author, who also serves as caregiver to her mother, had been in school and the first time learning how to think like a scientist.

While testing rebranding strategies on nurturing connections, she fell in love with qualitative research and taking deep dives into the way people think.

“I entered the program not sure of what it entailed and felt a little strange being decades older than my peers,” she said. “But I succeeded in learning to leverage commercial marketing strategies to influence behaviors for the greater social good.”

Jordan soon realized her personal perspective and life experience outside public health were assets that brought welcome insight and empathy to the research she and her colleagues carried out. The support she received throughout the program validated her interest in redefining human touch as an integral part of health and wellness.

This new skillset has opened the door for Jordan to become a social marketing consultant for health agencies in Reno. As an author is working on a second book on nonsexual touch for couples.

“My ultimate goal is to bring human touch to the public’s awareness as a tool for helping us cope with the human and social aspects of climate change. In the short term, I think it can help with the loneliness epidemic,” Jordan said.

Natalia Babenko, MPH in global health practice

Born and raised in Mariupol, Ukraine, Natalia Babenko began working in the pharmaceutical field after completing her BS and MS in chemistry from Donetsk National University in Ukraine.

After seven years in pharmaceuticals, she said she reached a point in her career where her true passion became preventing diseases and decided to pursue the field of public health. She ultimately joined the COPH’s MPH program and decided on a concentration in global health practice.

During her time at the COPH, Babenko said she was most proud of the research she was able to conduct, especially after the pandemic.

“I am proud of conducting research on the predictors of anxiety and depression in health care workers and further developing a public health prevention initiative for doctors in the Dominican Republic to decrease anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said. “Being a public health student helped me develop personal stress-coping mechanisms, which then enabled me to develop population-based interventions for managing stress and anxiety in health care-related cohorts.

Babenko said that she enjoyed her time in the program and is looking forward to using her public health knowledge in her career.

“I would definitely recommend the program for students who want to develop foundational knowledge in public health and understand the intricacies of public health concepts and theories,” she said.

She is continuing her education at the USF School of Aging Studies in its doctoral program.

“I hope that the results of my research can be used in developing intervention campaigns for aging communities to improve mental health via active social engagement and connection in the community,” Babenko said.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

The post The COPH graduates 359 public health heroes this summer appeared first on College of Public Health News.

One of Florida’s largest passenger rail services is experiencing an increase in ridership – and leaders of a Florida Department of Transportation program that promotes alternatives to commuters who drive alone attribute some of this success to guidance from an interdisciplinary team of researchers at USF who combined eye-tracking technology and social marketing to improve the impact of marketing campaigns.

As part of a collaboration with the Florida Department of Transportation, researchers from the USF Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR), a College of Public Health Social Marketing expert and the Muma College of Business Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation tested a variety of materials from Commuter Assistance Programs across the country to develop data-driven marketing guidelines to improve the effectiveness of commuter marketing efforts. 

“It leveraged our skills,” said Robert Hammond, director of the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation in the Muma College of Business. “This project provided us with an exciting opportunity to collaborate, be a resource for our community partners and leverage our Customer Experience Lab’s unique assets to provide novel insights.” 

The team monitored the eye movements of 60 participants as they studied various ads and videos, such as the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transit Authority’s promotional video of a new commuter app and a Delaware Commute Solutions flyer. Eye-tracking software generated heat maps and metrics of areas of interest, revealing clear patterns of focus.

Among many findings, the data showed participants tended to focus on faces, the left side of the ad and messages surrounded by white space. Areas of the ad least noticed were on the bottom and especially on the bottom right. The study participants also answered a series of questions to provide a measure of the materials’ perceived effectiveness in persuading drivers to alter their commuting behavior.

Based on the findings, the team generated guidelines to revise the marketing materials and improve their effectiveness. When they retested the materials, they found a 24% improvement in comprehension, attractiveness, acceptability, relevancy and persuasiveness. 

The results were even more impressive for the South Florida Regional Transportation Authority’s campaign to encourage Tri-Rail ridership by offering free Uber ride vouchers to and from its rail stations, located between Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, to resolve first and last mile connection issues. The initial flyer resulted in only a third of people who downloaded a voucher using it. After learning about USF’s new guidelines and making adjustments, a majority of vouchers were redeemed.

“We applied the lessons learned from the CUTR effort and we redesigned our flyer. What we found was by making these changes, it was a huge success and a lot of that we attribute to the creatives for this flyer because we basically use this design for everything,” Jeremy Mullings, project director for the South Florida Commuter Services, announced during a recent webinar hosted by Best Workplaces for Commuters.

“The guidelines that we have developed, and the lessons learned are informative towards new projects coming down the pipeline,” said lead investigator Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, an alumna and associate professor of social marketing in the College of Public Health. “This work will be instrumental in allowing us to develop communication materials and strategies that are personalized, targeted and relevant for our target populations.”

The USF team hopes these results will help additional transportation programs make further improvements and believes the findings could be widely applicable to marketing materials in a variety of industries.

“Professionals don’t necessarily need to do the neuromarketing test to find out what could be improved with their materials,” said Phil Winters, director of Transportation Demand Management program at CUTR. “The value lies in the best practices we found – those can be used to improve marketing materials without testing.”

Story reposted from USF Newsroom

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Social marketing uses commercial marketing principles (e.g., solving a customer’s problem with a product or service) to achieve socially beneficial ends, such as health and safety.

Building upon previous research, Dr. Claudia Parvanta, a USF College of Public Health professor who specializes in social marketing and health communication, and colleagues helping the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (CDC/NIOSH), interviewed company leads across the United States about their experiences and perceptions of COVID-19 testing.

Testing was promoted early in the pandemic as a critical tool to ensure workplace safety.

The study, “In Search of a Value Proposition for COVID-19 Testing in the Work Environment: A Social Marketing Analysis,” was published in September in the journal IJERPH.

“In reviewing qualitative data from the original study [which looked at barriers to COVID-19 testing among U.S. employers], I saw repeated comments about COVID-19 testing products,” Parvanta said. “There were comments about the tests and their costs, accessibility [the study was conducted in early 2021, before rapid tests were widely available] and how the testing had been communicated from state and federal agencies to employers and then their workforce. I suggested we reanalyze the data using a social marketing framework: product, price, place and promotion—the so-called four Ps of social marketing.”

What Parvanta and her colleagues found was that employers felt that PCR testing for COVID-19, which requires a reading from a lab, had a poor “value proposition.” In other words, noted Parvanta, the benefit of testing—which was being able to return to work quickly if results were negative—was negated by a variety of factors, including the time it took to get PCR test results, its uncomfortable administration, the logistical arrangements necessary for worksite use and the lingering positivity in individuals who no longer were infectious or experiencing symptoms.

“COVID-19 testing has evolved since the study was done,” Parvanta acknowledged, “and now anyone should be able to acquire a home antigen test kit. The larger issue from a workplace health perspective is using these results, which have a high false-negativity rate, to allow employees who had COVID-19 to return to work and trust that employees administering the test at home are getting accurate results. Our study suggested that communications about testing, or any mitigation tactics, could be targeted to industries based on how employees perceived their risk of exposure to air-borne diseases.”

According to Parvanta and her colleagues, this is the first study to apply a social marketing approach to employer experiences and perceptions to COVID-19 testing.

“Besides providing a detailed snapshot about this period in the pandemic, it demonstrates the use of a social marketing analysis in occupational safety and health (OSH),” Parvanta said. “The Florida Prevention Research Center used social marketing to improve citrus worker safety early in the center’s existence, but social marketing is much more widely seen in chronic and infectious disease prevention directed to the public at large. Publication with this research team in this journal could lead to more social marketing in OSH and, hence, more voluntary adoption of health and safety behaviors in the workplace.”   

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

The post Using a social marketing lens to examine employers’ experiences with COVID-19 testing appeared first on College of Public Health News.

Angela Makris, a USF College of Public Health (COPH) doctoral candidate, recently attended the European Social Marketing Conference and served on a panel focusing on the role social marketing can play in health and health care disparities for people with disabilities. 

The conference was held in Greece in June.

The panel addressed a series of topics, including:

• How social marketing can promote social inclusion and help create programs for underrepresented populations, in particular those who are disabled.
• How to increase social marketing research and interventions in the disability sector
• How to adapt social marketing methodologies and strategies so public health and social services professionals can improve the quality of life of disabled people
• How to train professionals who want to adopt and integrate social marketing in their programs and activities
• How to create a pathway for more inclusive recruitment of people with disabilities in research and community-based behavior change programs

“​Social marketing, by its very nature, is inclusive,” said Makris, who’s concentrating in community and family health. “No social marketing initiative occurs without the involvement of the community the initiative is being aimed at. The mantra for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) is ‘nothing about us without us.’ It’s a mantra that developed due to the manipulative nature of the health care field in the past. That is, the ‘problem’ was with the person who has the disability, and we need to fix them.”

According to Makris, the failure of public health practitioners to use social marketing initiatives to engage with the disabled community is twofold.

“First, the definition of disabilities and impairment in public health has never been clearly understood and, secondly, there has been limited interdisciplinary research between public health professionals and those working in the disability sector,” she said. “We can look at our own campus as an example. There’s limited interdisciplinary work being done between the COPH and the College of Community and Behavioral Sciences, which has a strong focus on IDD in their curriculum. I’m hoping that my dissertation focus will help create a wider bridge between not only these two colleges but research work as well.”

Makris said that social marketing could be a bridge between public health practitioners and the disability sector. “Social marketing’s focus has always been on the individual or the community,” she said. “Going forward, needs assessments must assume that limitations in individuals often coexist with strengths. A person’s level of functioning will improve if appropriate personalized supports are provided over a sustained period.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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Alec Bowden and Hope Michael, USF College of Public Health (COPH) MPH students concentrating in public health education, recently competed in the National Case Study Competition in Health Education (NCSCHE). The event was held virtually in February.

According to its website, “Every year, NCSCHE brings together up to 50 teams (30 undergrad and 20 grad) from leading universities to compete in solving a real-life challenge. Three weeks prior to the competition, students and their advisor will be emailed a community-based public health case. Students work independently to develop a resolution to the issue and a presentation for a panel of judges.”

Bowden and Michael were tasked with developing a social marketing strategy that would help increase awareness of sun safety behavior(s) in a rural Minnesota community. The aim of the social marketing strategy was to reduce skin cancer risk and as well as skin cancer morbidity and mortality rates.

To prepare, Bowden and Michael gathered data about the components of the case study along with investigating commonly used social marketing strategies. Their aim was to produce a proactive and innovative solution to the problem presented by the case study.

“We also made sure to use all available resources and rubrics that were provided by the competition leaders to ensure that we were meeting all the requirements and guidelines,” Michael noted.

The two started by looking at information about skin cancer in their target Minnesota community to develop an intervention strategy that would be feasible, effective and attractive. They examined risk factors of skin cancer, community demographics, occupations, community activity (i.e., parks and recreation), etc.

“Once we learned more about our community, we researched what was already being implemented at the local, state and national levels,” Michael explained.

“Our resulting strategy was to implement a community-based intervention that was heavily influenced by current programs facilitated by the National Cancer Institute’s SunSafe, which caters to children 10 and under, and Together for Sun Safety, the adult-level counterpart,” Bowden added. “From there, we added additional health education-based influences, such as partnering with local news teams on interpreting UV index reports along with financial-benefiting incentives, such as partnering with local grocery stores to provide reduced-price or free sunscreen.”

While the team didn’t place, they’re glad they participated in the competition and encouraged other students to do the same. 

“We thought it would be a learning opportunity to gain experience working with case studies and to increase our knowledge of current intervention strategies that are used in communities such as our case study,” Michael said. 

The team’s faculty advisor, Dr. Anna Torrens Armstrong, a COPH associate professor and alum of the college, agreed. 

“Events like the National Case Study Competition in Health Education provide students with a chance to apply their skills, engage in competition and learn from the experience,” she said. “It builds professionalism by having students prepare a presentation for an outside audience and get feedback. It also allows them to engage in the competencies that inform our program curriculum, so they can see how what they learn plays out in a reality-based case scenario.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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A warning from USF researchers: Scam artists are taking advantage of online surveys that pay for participation – a method of market research that has become more common practice since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This conclusion stems from a study that began just before the start of the pandemic in 2020. The Florida Department of Health Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida funded the USF College of Public Health and Muma College of Business to evaluate anti-tobacco public service announcements using neuromarketing measures. The researchers planned to monitor participants as they watched the PSAs using electroencephalograms, sensors that measure hand sweat and heart rate and computer software that tracks eye movements and facial expressions. 

But like many aspects of research, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the USF team to pivot its approach to an “at home” setting. They and the lab’s technology partner, iMotions, reconfigured the study and the software, limiting it to facial expression and attention analysis via webcam. Participants were also asked about the effectiveness of the PSAs, producing what’s known as a perceived effectiveness (PE) score. Many agencies and institutions rely on PE scores to identify which PSAs would be most persuasive in specific media markets.

In a study published in the journal Social Marketing Quarterly, the researchers report that the facial expression data showed a large percentage of participants may not be who they claimed to be and that their data could have dramatically shifted the results. 

Participants were required to be a current or recent tobacco user, Florida resident, and have access to a web camera. They were recruited using two methods: Through community partners sharing digital flyers and through a professional panel recruiter. The participants were offered a cash or other incentive to watch three of 12 PSAs in random order.

Despite signing a consent form that explained their faces would be recorded, 42 of the 92 responses from the “community” group were fake, either using stock photos in place of their faces or taking the survey multiple times with different IP addresses. Even the 409 responses from the vetted panel recruiter included 45 that deployed deceitful tactics, such as uploading a video of a person watching something on a screen or they demonstrated lack of engagement, which was calculated by the participant’s head position.

“This research presents a cautionary tale about compensated online surveys,” said co-author Rob Hammond, marketing instructor and director of the Center for Marketing and Sales Innovation at USF. “In addition to deliberate deceitful behavior in both the community and vetted panel groups, the lack of attention suggests individuals may approach online surveys ‘as a job’ resulting in less effort and attention.”

These findings show the impact fraudulent data can have on a study’s results. When rank-ordering the PSAs by PE score, six of the 12 would have been misjudged. More critically, two of the three top PSAs selected by the valid respondents had Black lead characters. Those same PSAs were not ranked in the top three based on the sample that included deceitful responses. 

“Public health agencies strive to develop culturally attuned health messages. It’s essential to test these messages with representatives of the intended audience,” said principal investigator Claudia Parvanta, professor and social marketing concentration lead. “We’ve learned the hard way that we need to confirm that study participants reflect the desired cultural background but also have sufficient interest in the subject under study.” 

With marketing surveys increasingly moving online, the researchers suggest that compensation should only be provided to respondents after the data have been verified. 

Reposted from USF Newsroom

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The USF College of Public Health’s Social Marketing Conference is headed back to the beach as it enters its 26th year with a continued and vigorous commitment to social marketing’s robust capacity to influence complex social problems. Based at the Sheraton Sand Key Resort in Clearwater, FL, the May 27-28 conference includes plenary sessions, interactive panels and focused collaborative sessions. A training academy will be held right before the conference on May 25-26 to provide in-depth training on the social marketing process.

The conference will attract an estimated 250 professionals working in fields such as environmental health, transportation, wildlife preservation, financial literacy, education, not-for-profit management, labor relations, the arts, health and many more.

In recognition of social marketing’s expansive reach and increasing interest in persons in other disciplines, organizers have shifted the scope of the Social Marketing Conference beyond public health to welcome all professionals who work in social marketing.

Newcomers to the field are encouraged to attend the Social Marketing Training Academy in addition to the main conference. This two-day intensive pre-conference training offers participants an opportunity to gain social marketing expertise in a concentrated time frame. Using a combination of live case studies and interactive group exercises, academy trainers help participants understand how to increase the impact of behavioral change by learning the core elements of a successful social marketing initiative.

The main conference offers a blend of plenary presentations by internationally recognized social marketing experts on topics of interest to learners at all levels; panel presentations and conversations that focus on a variety of topics relevant to the practice, application and dissemination of social marketing; continuing professional development; and “hatch labs” to enable participants to discuss ideas with each other and invited experts.

Additionally, examples of social marketing practice and research will be showcased during a poster walk and reception.

Keynote Speakers include:

• Rex Briggs, author, consultant and speaker
• Dr. Roy Eidelson, psychologist
• Sara Isaac, director of strategy and planning for Marketing for Change
• Jeffrey Jordan, president and executive creative director for Rescue Social Change Group
• Rose McGee, creator of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie
• Bill Novelli, founder of Business for Impact at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business

For additional information on the Social Marketing Conference and to register, visit http://thesocialmarketingconference.org/ or contact socialmarketing-coph@usf.edu.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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Two years into a worldwide pandemic and COVID-19 still grips our attention.

And rightly so. 

Overall, there have been more than 250 million cases of COVID-19 and 5 million-plus deaths. Vaccines have offered hope, but with fewer than 60 percent of the American population fully vaccinated and new mutations bursting on the scene, the virus marches on.

We surveyed the USF College of Public Health (COPH) faculty about what they thought were the biggest public health stories—within their particular fields of expertise—for 2021. COVID-19 was the overwhelming theme, but these public health professionals dug deeper than COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths. They looked at how COVID-19 influenced vaccine hesitancy, access to health care, substance abuse and more. Here, some of their nuanced insights:

More firearms

“During COVID-19 and the social unrest in 2020 and beyond, background checks for firearms in the State of Florida greatly increased. Results show huge increases from 2019 to 2020, starting in March of 2020 (92 percent increase compared to March of 2019) with the COVID-19 pandemic. With the protests starting in June, we saw a 174 percent increase compared to June of 2019. We know that increased firearms in the home lead to greater numbers of suicides, homicides and unintentional firearm deaths. 

The trend is continuing. We’re still at higher numbers than in pre-pandemic years. I think that’s because there are still feelings of uneasiness, fear, social unrest, etc. It’s imperative that we now make use of what we’ve learned and are prepared with efficacious risk/gun safety communication and intervention programs to prevent increased gun ownership and firearm injuries and deaths.”—Dr. Karen Liller, professor and injury-prevention expert

Low access to health care for women with opioid dependence in Florida

“Substance use disorder—and neonatal abstinence syndrome [disorders caused by neonatal exposure to certain drugs]— have been rising nationwide and in Florida, with even higher rates during COVID-19. In partnership with colleagues at Vanderbilt University and an advisory committee of women in recovery, our statewide secret shopper study assessed access to treatment and access to prenatal care in Florida for pregnant women with Medicaid for over 1,000 medication-assisted treatment providers and over 1000 prenatal care providers. Half of providers were unreachable. Thirty percent of callers could access treatment while 19 percent of callers could access prenatal care. The USF team is meeting with all levels of leadership at the Florida Department of Health, the Department of Children and Families and AHCA/Medicaid to strategize system improvements based on these findings.” —Dr. Jennifer Marshall, associate professor who specializes in child health and development

Overall vaccine hesitancy

“I think one of the biggest public health stories is the loss of other vaccinations related to the COVID vaccine controversy and hesitancy. My area of research is the HPV vaccine, and we’ve lost whole cohorts of adolescents who didn’t get vaccinated, and we may not get them back because of lost opportunities to vaccinate.”—Dr. Ellen Daley, professor, associate dean of research and practice and a women’s health/adolescent health expert

More culturally and linguistically appropriate COVID information

“In 2020, and now, the discussion has focused on the disparities related to COVID-19 infection and, later, vaccination. I am working with a consortium of researchers and community partners to address these concerns through social marketing. Social marketing and related behavior change methodologies build on the tradition, culture and language of the people that it [COVID-19] affects. Recently, we’ve seen news stories about initial successes [more Hispanics getting vaccinated, for instance] and largely that has been attributed to more tailored and personalized responses along with making vaccines accessible.”—Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, assistant professor associate director, WHO Collaborating Centre on Social Marketing and Social Change and social marketing specialist

Balanced, apolitical COVID-19 media coverage

“While the biggest public health story is undeniably the COVID pandemic, the elements most related to my expertise that particularly deserve the spotlight are the extensive public information resources that USF faculty dedicated to helping the community and the nation understand what COVID meant and how it would affect their lives. For the greater part, this response was apolitical and based on good science, good medicine, and pragmatic public policy. We were among the first in the nation to speak aggressively about the post-infection chronic syndromes that are now headline medical news. We also worked intimately with local and state public health, government and business leaders to acquire, analyze, report and generate policies related to how communities and health care institutions should respond to the multi-dimensional realities that define COVID. 

As we enter 2022, the next steps are to remain on top of the science, medicine and politics and retain the trust of the community, the media, local and state government officials and business leaders in order to competently inform public policy and the citizens in the communities we serve.”—Dr. Jay Wolfson, distinguished service professor of public health medicine and pharmacy

Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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In June 2020, the Office of Minority Health (OMH), part of Health and Human Services (HHS), announced the award of a $40 million grant to the Morehouse School of Medicine and key strategic partners, including the USF College of Public Health’s (COPH) Florida Prevention Research Center (FPRC). Along with ICF Next, a global marketing agency, the FPRC is part of the communication cluster of the National COVID-19 Resiliency Network (NCRN).

In year one of this three-year grant, the partners have worked with community-based organizations across the nation to develop and test culturally and linguistically appropriate communication resources about vaccination for minority groups who have been particularly affected by COVID-19.

Throughout the project period, the FPRC team:

• Conducts literature reviews addressing current knowledge, attitudes and behaviors in regard to COVID-19 mitigation strategies.
• Helps develop the formative research plans and methodology.
• Provides training and technical assistance to community partners in using Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) to use social marketing to enhance messaging to specific audiences. CBPM is a program-planning framework developed by the FPRC that combines community engagement with social marketing to achieve sustainable change.
• Use neuromarketing methods to test communication materials. Neuromarketing uses physiological sensors to detect eye tracking, facial expressions and brain activity that reflect emotional response to a test stimulus, in this case, communication media developed for social media or print.

The FPRC team is training their third cohort of community organizations on what social marketing is and how they can apply it to COVID-19 vaccine uptake for the priority populations with which they work.

According to Dr. Mahmooda Khaliq Pasha, a COPH alumna and assistant professor who is a co-principal investigator on the project, “What we found is that through our approach using the community’s expertise and building  a persona, we were able to provide a vivid representation of the community and identify some of the barriers to access and the reasons behind why a specific community may not be getting vaccinated.”

Pasha said that so far, the impact of their research has been successful in helping community-based organizations to see the benefit of tailoring messaging to fit their communities rather than relying solely on generic mass media that seek to appeal to everyone.

Angela Makris, COPH PhD student and research assistant for the FPRC, presented on their research using the CBPM framework and creation of population personas at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting from October 24-27.

“Our other role in the project is pretesting materials created by an ICF Next. We collaborate with the Muma College of Business Center for Sales and Marketing Innovation, which provides the neuromarketing research software. When we collect enough data across all of the tests, we will be able to create statistical models of how emotional responses relate to attitudes about the COVID-19 vaccine, “said Dr. Claudia Parvanta, COPH professor and project principal investigator. “With neuromarketing we can test the effects of communications tailored to specific racial and ethnic backgrounds. We have long assumed this is better, but this project provides a chance to measure the effects on a deeper level than self-report.”

Read more about this story here.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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