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Many people prefer interacting with other people to reading, surfing the Web, watching television, or listening to the radio. To reach those people in your audience, you may want to add a personal dimension to your promotional efforts.

Examples of personal outreach include:

• Making formal and/or informal presentations about the report to groups of audience members or to groups of people who are highly trusted by audience members and can “spread the word.”
• Hosting a booth at a health fair or other event.
• Visiting a senior center during the lunch hour and giving a 5-minute talk about the report and how to access it. (If you have a print report, this can be a distribution method as well).

Conducting Outreach Through Information Intermediaries

Most sponsors don’t have enough staff to reach a large number of audience members in this personal way. But you can supplement staff by working with “information intermediaries,” i.e., organizations that are willing and able to spread your key messages to your audience.

Who Could Be Information Intermediaries?

Dozens, even hundreds, of organizations in your area are potential information intermediaries. They interact with your audience frequently, are trusted by your audience, and perhaps most important, care about your audience. Intermediaries include organizations that:

• Provide services (such as libraries, retirement residences, and community centers).
• Advocate for the needs of a specific population.
• Support the practice of a faith.
• Support the needs or interests of a specific cultural or demographic group.

In addition to groups like this, who may not have a particular health or health care mission, health care organizations, including those you rate, may also serve as intermediaries. However, take special care to make sure they convey your message rather than a message that undermines the accuracy, fairness, and utility of your report. Providing information in advance of the report release and spending time discussing it with them can help you both determine whether they will be constructive intermediaries or not.

What Can Information Intermediaries Do?

While information intermediaries may support the project in different ways, a key role for them is to provide personal outreach. For example, intermediaries can spread the word about:

• The existence of your report.
• Where to find it.
• Why consumers can trust the content.
• How consumers can benefit from the information.

They can do this through communications to their entire constituency, such as e-mails, posters, newsletters, pamphlets, and announcements at meetings. In addition, they can pinpoint and reach out to the specific individuals who are most likely to make good use of the report.

Another important role of information intermediaries is to help people use the information in your report. Learn more in Supporting Consumers in Using the Information.

In some cases, information intermediaries may also help provide your audience with access to a Web-based report if the intermediary makes computers available in an organizational setting for community members. This is one reason to cultivate relationships with libraries, but it may be true of other groups as well, including retirement residences, senior centers, and other community centers.

Tips on Working With Partners To Conduct Outreach

• Seek out these partners early in the process and stay in touch. Try to identify a long-term liaison on both sides of the relationship.
• Treat the staff with respect. Their response to you will determine how they portray you to their constituents.
• Provide key staff, community leaders, or volunteers with a basic orientation to your project to make sure they convey your message accurately and to the right people.
• Answer their questions and address their concerns as fully as possible. You may find that some staff are very surprised by the content of your report. For example, a hospital they thought was excellent may be in the bottom quarter of the distribution. You need to engage on this issue, not ignore it. You want your outreach partners to reinforce the accuracy and relevance of your report, not undermine it. They may not be completely convinced about your rating of a given facility, but they will at least believe that you are not trying to undermine the facility in your report.
• Ask the staff for advice on the best ways to promote your report to their constituency; let them know when and how you use it.
• Once you have your partners’ input, develop promotional text and specific materials they can adapt for their constituency. Don’t put the burden on them to figure out what to say about your report. (Refer to example below.)
• Ask them for feedback about how people they touch are responding to your report and to your promotional efforts.
• Remember that many of these groups have little in the way of financial resources, although they have priceless assets for your efforts. Find out how you can help them, either in ways related to comparative quality reporting or in other ways.
• Offer to reciprocate by sharing information they want to get out, especially with the more powerful members of your core partnership with whom they may not have existing relationships.

EXAMPLE: Equipping Employer Partners With Promotional Materials
 

For More Information

• Learn more about selecting partners for your reporting project in Who Are Potential Partners.
• Learn more about Choosing and Involving Partners in promotional efforts.

Also in "Using Multiple Promotion Strategies"

• Using Mass Media to Spread Messages
• Using Advertising and Free Placements
• Using Person-to-Person Outreach Strategies