Digging into the pillars of outreach: public relations.

Outreach often plays a large role in patient recruitment (revisit Praxis’ pillars of outreach blog). Whether it’s serving a targeted ad on Facebook to drive patients to a trial website for more information or reaching out to a trusted organization to bring validity to a study, we have multiple ways of supporting clinical trial recruitment campaigns of all sizes and scopes.

While every outreach approach offers effective tactics to encourage both enrollment and retention in a study, public relations (PR) offers a vehicle to connect with audiences in a more credible way.

Our approach to PR.

At Praxis, PR is an outreach lever we pull when we see awareness and credibility as barriers to enrollment. Although PR traditionally encompasses everything from executive visibility to organic social media, we often recommend media relations – or establishing and leveraging relationships with journalists, editors, and reporters to drive earned news coverage – as a potential outreach tactic.

Depending on the scale of the study, as well as the number and location of study sites, a media relations campaign can focus consumer media publications with national or global reach, hyper-targeted local news outlets in markets surrounding study sites, or a mix of both. Media relations outreach can focus on the specific study to spark consideration among a particular demographic or audience, or broadly cover the condition to raise general awareness. When deployed effectively, a media relations campaign can result in timely, targeted, and often humanizing stories that leverage approved messaging.

PR strategies made to order.

To get the most effective media coverage for a study, our in-house PR team typically works with partners to:

• Create new messaging for or tailor existing messaging to various external audiences
• Leverage messaging to draft institutional review board (IRB)-approved media materials like press releases or media advisories
• Conduct media outreach, leveraging existing reporter relationships or forging new ones on behalf of our partner
• Liaise with local site contacts to ensure consistent messaging or coordinate local media opportunities
• Monitor for earned media coverage and track metrics like reach or messaging pull-through

Let’s do this together.

To learn more about Praxis’ outreach capabilities, including public relations, send us a note.