My name is Kellee Waters.

I'm with C.D.C. in emergency and response operations.

Thank you for joining us today for today's webinar entitled

communication partnership for public health emergencies.

If you do not wish for your participation to be recorded, please exit at

this time.

You can earn continuing education by completing this webinar and the

information can be found our on website.

The access code is EPIC with all capital letters, EPIC0129, to repeat,

in all caps, EPIC.

O219.

To ask us a question, use the Q&A button.

Closed captions are available for this webinar.

Today, we will hear from Jonathan Lynch a core member of the EPIC team.

He is a Forder broadcast medical news producer who has been a producer

at C.D.C. for 16 years.

He studied mathematics, economics and business.

He applied disciplines to building EPIC partnerships.

These are a collection of relationships that C.D.C. maintains to help

share potentially life-saving information during public health

emergencies.

Although Jonathan usually handles the Q&A session of the EPIC webinars,

today, he will be our presenter Jonathan, please begin.

Jonathan Lynch: Thank you.

One second.

There we go.

Next slide, please.

So first, we're aware that some people may be connecting because they

want to know more about the novel Coronavirus outbreak.

This webinar is not focused on the topic, although the suggestions from

this presentation apply to many different types of public health

concerns, including infectious disease outbreak, if you want to know

more go to cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019.

I'm a math nerd, so I apologize for this, but they are letting me get

away with this of indulgence here and it will explain how it is so hard

how you can communicate through a complex social network.

I have cards.

I have shuffled them and which you may not know is this deck of cards in

this order more than likely this is the first time in the entire history

of the world that a deck of cards has been in this order.

More than likely, the last time it will ever happen, so it seems

impossible on the surface, but if you look at the math on this, first

card has one out of 52 possibilities, the next one, one out of 51, that

is called a 52 factorial and it is more than the number of atoms on

iter.

The reason this is relevant to partnership communicating and when you're

communicating to other partners and constituents, you have you a pathway

your message flows through, you can't predict how it is going to go.

Instead of being precise, you have to work with general principles and I

will show you in a minute and sometimes you get a great result and

sometimes you get a less than ideal result.

Next slide, please.

Here is why we need communication partnerships.

The channels we work with for communicating, such as news media, social

media, various clinical channels reach specific audiences that might be

effective, but might not reach everyone.

Communication partnerships help to reach the hard to reach people that

may be at most risk, few examples are isolated people during hurricanes,

elderly people during flu season, migrant workers during a mosquito

outbreak.

Next slide, please.

Here are a few examples of the partners that we use to accomplish this.

Pardon me.

We have 60 communication partners, we have some faith-based partners,

governmental partners, some partners who work in the emergency response

community, some who have an international presence, but also a presence

in the U.S., some work at a local level.

Next slide, please.

These partners were selected for the ability to help us reach people, so

I'm going to do a quick demonstration and I am going to present my

screen here, just a second.

Share, share, OK.

So I'm going to demonstrate why we need to, not only work with partners,

but why it is so important to maximize the methods we use to work with

partners to have successful communication.

This is an application that I designed that demonstrates how viral

messaging works and why it is inconsistent even with the same

parameters.

Each represents a layer and each dot represents an organization.

The odds of a partner for this simulation passing your message on are

50% and the number of messages they pass it on to is set to two, so run

the simulation and it reefs one person.

I run it again and two organizations, but you can see with the exact

same parameters, just a few tweaks can make a difference between

reaching a few or as we see here, fairly extensive market penetration

with a message.

It is important to understand those techniques that increase the

probability of retransmission and the number of organizations that you

pass your message on to.

Can we go back to the slides?

So here is how the principles apply and in that simulation, each node is

a communication partner, each line is a message of transmission.

The probability of a message being transmitted can be low if the

organization is not motivated to, they don't know you very well, they

don't trust you very well.

They may be busy, they may be sick.

That can happen.

The more nodes you want to reach, the harder it is to be successful

because there is a possibility of the message being interrupted each

time.

So what that means is flat networks is better, that is if you're

starting from where you are and reaching several different organizations

and it may go two or three levels down before it reaches the target

population, there is a higher probability of success than expecting them

to do the work for you.

We find direct outreach improves retransmission, so when we're trying to

pass on what is potentially a life-saving message, we share that

information with a partner and we call them up and say we're sharing

this information, can you please share this?

Getting that personal interaction oh, yeah, we'll pass it on that makes

a huge difference for us.

Finally, messages can be corrupted.

If you are, for instance, sharing information with the media and rather

taking what you produce, they are interpreting it and sharing the

interpretation with the message.

If you have an electronic message and people are passing it straight

from your organization to the end user it gets mostly uncorrupted by the

time it reaches and that can help with accurate information sharing.

Next slide, please.

I divided this up into steps.

Step one is segmenting the audience and anyone who has take an marketing

class recognizes this as a first step.

There are certain questions you can asking yourself, which groups will

not likely be reached through mainstream media?

If you're relying on media or other reliable networks and that covers

all your needs that's fine, but if you think about those with limited

English proficiency, those who have sensory barriers, difficulty with

hearing or vision, people who might be isolated or come from a sub

culture that is socially, partially disconnected from the mainstream

culture, all of those things may be a concern, so you need to find

organizations that serve those groups.

You also have to ask, who will need specific information that they are

unlikely to receive from mainstream media, so you might be sharing

messages with regular media outlets, but certain specific pieces of

information may be something they might not be as interested in passing

on, so specific information for pregnant women, older adults, people

experiencing power outages for multiple reasons those messages you may

need to work with communication partners, so you find the partners who

can deliver the messages to high-risk groups.

Finally, which groups may not have -- I have a visibility problem here,

which groups may be disconnected from your organization even if they are

otherwise connected to sort of a larger social network, so it may be

that your natural communication recipients are sort of different from

the groups from like a particular group you want to reach, so you may

need to find a specialty organization to reach a group because it is not

connected to your organization.

Next slide.

OK, so here is some examples of audio segmentation from the EPIC team

for reaching Spanish-speaking populations, we have more than one for a

lot of these examples, we have a partner with the Hispanic federation.

One example for sub cultures, we made a partnership with the center for

Haitian studies in southern Florida that help to communicate about zika

to pregnant Haitian women during the outbreak.

We have a couple of migrant farm workers organizations that we're

connected to as well.

Cultural isolation, people experiencing homelessness can be isolated,

not always actually, they may have a degree in electronic to libraries,

but they can be socially isolated, so we have two different

organizations that focus on homelessness and we have partners with the

public library association who serves a large homeless population and

they are helpful in sharing information.

Another example is for persons experiencing Hearing Loss Association of

America, they have been an excellent partner of ours for multiple

reasons.

Next slide, please.

Step two, identify partners who can help with communication activities.

It is not enough that the partners serve an audience you need to reach,

you need to make sure they have the ability to share information, so

seek out partners who can provide information to you, to redistribute to

others in your network that can be a useful tool and EPIC has done that,

seek out partners who can disseminate information to targeted audiences

that means they have a constituent you might want to reach, they have a

mechanism to reach the constituents and they have sufficient staff size

and engagement and personal interest to accomplish this.

Finally, partners who can offer insight on communication needs.

On the previously slide, I mentioned the hearing loss association of

America, they influenced us to provide live closed captioning on our

webinars and they are right about that.

It is nice to not only get someone who can distribute messages, but can

help inform you on how to do it better.

Next slide.

So of course, we can think about sectors in many different ways.

We focus on public sector, nonprofit sector and private sector.

Next slide.

In the public sector, when you're seeking out partners, typically, we

break it down to federal, state, and local levels, federal partners are

C.D.C., FEMA and SAMHSA.

Federal can be very large and no organization has perfect inside the

organization communication, so that means if you want a specific federal

partner for a specific activity, seek out the teams, the functions, the

groups that work on the activity and partner with them directly that

just seems more effective than trying to work from the top down in the

Federal Government.

At the sate level, of course, those working in public health, state

health departments are wonderful partners on several levels, but also

consider working with state-run assistance programs because they might

serve populations that you have a high interest in reaching with

communication activities.

They might have a ready mechanism to share the messages.

At the local level, schools.

Teach the students, teach the parents, if you can share information with

schools, you can share the information and it is a great way to get

information to the entire family, so something to bear in mind.

For the nonprofit sector, which we have many nonprofit partners,

consider emergency response organizations, a lot of people attend our

webinars are coming from emergency response organizations, but consider

partnering with them even if you're going to work on more than just,

like disasters like hurricanes or floods or something like that, because

they have a lot of resources and a lot of motivated to volunteers, of

course, national VOAD is a great organization, if you look at state and

local VOAD's are a great resource to partner with.

Faith-based organizations can often reach specific populations, which is

helpful.

They are often highly motivated to and they established a lot of trust

with the people they serve, so that is a great way to, again, get a

motivated to partner who is likely to pass on your message and

communication based -- sorry, community-based organizations may serve a

specific sub culture and they might have several excellent ways to share

information with that group as well.

Next slide.

The private sector, I have heard multiple times that people are hesitant

to partner with the private sector because they are worried about the