by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 19, 2007 | Blog, Entertainment, Policy
Thanks to the efforts of many people, Senator Coburn removed the provision to eliminate funding for the CDC’s Entertainment Education program from his proposed amendment before it even made it to the floor for a vote (here’s the background if you are just joining the story now). High fives all around!
So, as it stands now, the Senate version of the HHS appropriations bill leaves the funding intact, while the House version has it eliminated. From my limited policy knowledge, I believe the next step will be for the House and Senate to reconcile the two versions of the bill in conference. I will let you know when and how we can try to influence that process when the time comes.
We made a difference! (And, no, I don’t receive any funding myself from this program. It’s the principle of the thing.)
Technorati Tags: cdc, hhs, senate, coburn, social marketing, hollywood, public health
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 18, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous
On Monday, I will be hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, a traveling compilation of the best blog posts of the week. This week the Carnival will focus on social marketing for nonprofits. You can either write something specifically for the Carnival or send in your favorite post that fits the theme.
If you would like to submit a post for consideration, send it to npc.carnival AT yahoo DOT com with your name, your blog’s name and the URL of the post (not your blog homepage). The deadline this week is Sunday, 5:00 pm Pacific Time.
Watch for the big top going up on Monday!
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 18, 2007 | Blog, Entertainment, Policy
Thanks to my well-placed source on the ground in Washington, here is a brief update on the status of the entertainment education funding:
The Senate began consideration of the Labor-HHS bill yesterday and continues today (and possibly tomorrow). Sen. Coburn filed his amendment to eliminate funding for the Entertainment Education program, signaling his intention to offer it at some point during debate on the bill. We do not have a time frame for when Coburn will formally offer the amendment and when the Senate will debate it.
In his column today praising Senator Coburn’s efforts to eliminate pork from the budget (a worthy goal, but misguided in this case), Bob Novak of the Washington Post mentions the “$1.7 million added to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget to fund a Hollywood liaison to advise doctor dramas.” This vastly oversimplifies the purpose of the program, and ignores the public health impact that results from collaborating with the entertainment industry to achieve the CDC’s health behavior change goals. If anything, it’s the anti-pork (literally and figuratively).
I just called both my Senators to urge them to oppose Senator Coburn’s pending amendment. If you feel as strongly about defending the value of the entertainment education approach as I do, I hope you will call or email your Senators today as well. I think we especially need people from outside of California to contact your Senators, because most of the efforts so far have been centered in L.A.
To make it even easier for you, here are a couple of sentences you can use as-is or adapt for when you call:
Hi, I’m calling to urge Senator ____ to oppose Senator Coburn’s amendment to the Labor/HHS appropriations bill that would eliminate funding for the CDC’s entertainment education program. This is an effective and cost-efficient public health tool that has been proven to increase health knowledge and healthy behaviors among television viewers. Thank you.
Two minutes per phone call, and we can make this happen. We’ve got the power.
Photo Credit: sazztastical
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 15, 2007 | Blog, Entertainment, Policy
I have been intending to write about this for some time, and with the US Senate about to open up debate on the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services this week, the time must be now.
Back in July, when the House of Representatives was voting on the HHS Appropriations bill, Congressman Ryan of Wisconsin successfully passed an amendment on a voice vote that took out the line item for the CDC’s entertainment education project (currently housed at USC as Hollywood, Health and Society). This is a well-known, successful program that works with television writers and other entertainment industry professionals to ensure that health issues are depicted accurately and to work towards inclusion of health content into shows to promote healthy behaviors on the part of the audience. I have written about the effectiveness of the entertainment education approach many times before.
Congressman Ryan lumped this program in with other instances of what he considers wasteful spending by the CDC and tarred it with a very broad brush. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of his remarks:
Mr. Chairman, there is a recent troubling report entitled “CDC Off Center,” which was produced under the direction of Senator Coburn with a report in the Senate Government Affairs Committee. Instead of using its resources to fight life-threatening diseases like HIV/AIDS and cancer, the CDC has instead spent money on needless luxury items and nongovernment functions.
For example, the CDC’s Office of Health and Safety recently provided its employees with a new, extravagant fitness center that includes such items as rotating pastel “mood” lights, zero-gravity chairs, and $30,000 dry-heat saunas. The CDC has also spent over $1.7 million on a “Hollywood liaison” to advise TV shows like “E.R.” and “House” on medical information included in their programming, clearly an expense that should have been covered by the successful for-profit television shows, not by our hard-earned tax dollars. They also further squandered taxpayer dollars in an office intended to help improve employee morale…
In a time when we are facing increasing risk of bioterrorism and disease, these are hardly the best use of taxpayer dollars. My amendment simply would ensure that the CDC would not be able to spend any more Federal funding on these three boondoggles described above. And it is my hope that we can get the CDC focused on doing its job, which is very important and they do a good job on that, and not on these kinds of boondoggles.
With that one sentence about the “Hollywood liaison,” boom, out went that program. I’m not going to comment on the rest of the CDC “boondoggles” because I don’t know enough about them. I do know that entertainment education is not a boondoggle, but a very effective public health activity.
Congressman Ryan’s chief objection seems to be that those rich Hollywood types should pay for their own darn consultants if they want to be medically accurate. The fact is, TV writers and producers are in the business of telling stories and entertaining people. There aren’t many producers out there like Neal Baer who put a premium on incorporating health education while telling a good story. Many need to be convinced, and then handed the information on a silver platter. If programs like Hollywood Health and Society (HHS) and others like it weren’t doing constant outreach to the entertainment industry, much more inaccurate information would be getting out to the public, which might then be erroneously acted upon.
And that doesn’t take into account that this type of outreach is much more cost-effective than producing television ads and purchasing time to run them. Some examples of the cost savings can be found by looking at the shows HHS has consulted on (thank you to my anonymous well-placed contacts who provided me with this information):
- Show: ER
Topic: adolescent obesity and related topics
Length: approx. 7 minutes
Audience: 24.8 million
If purchased time using ad rate: $4,818,324
Evaluation results:
• Viewers reported more healthy behaviors after seeing the storyline, i.e. exercising and eating healthy (AOR 1.65, p< .01>• Viewers had more knowledge of 5 A Day compared with non-viewers (AOR 1.05, p< .05>• Men had the greatest and most significant gains in knowledge (AOR 1.25, p< .01>
- Show: 24
Topic: Bioterrorism/major disease outbreak
Length: approx. 20 minutes
Audience: 11.4 million
Cost if purchased time using ad rate: $12,360,000
Evaluation results:
• Viewers who saw one or more of the 5 storyline episodes had increased knowledge about susceptibility to a bioterrorism attack, how infection spreads, public health response, and steps to take in a bioterrorism emergency.
• Viewers were also significantly influenced in their intention to follow directions from authorities.
Over the past five years, the total time that television shows aired public health information concerning CDC topics was approximately 545 min., reaching 586 million viewers. The total cost if they had purchased ad time on those shows would have been $72,442,644. For the number of people they reached, and the effectiveness of the content, I’d say the program was a bargain at $1.7 million.
If you agree that the CDC should continue to promote public health through the very effective entertainment education approach, please contact your Senators to express your support for retaining this funding. You can find your Senators’ email and fax numbers here. You can adapt this sample letter:
Date
Senator _______
U.S. Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator _______:
I am writing to share my support for the CDC’s Entertainment Education Program, an important public health tool which utilizes the power of popular mass media to educate Americans about healthy behaviors. I urge you to oppose any attempts to eliminate funding for the program when the Senate considers the Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008.
The CDC’s Entertainment Education Program fosters the use of factual health information in television shows and promotes the incorporation of important and timely public health messages into television programming. Funding for this program allows the CDC to reach out to television writers with written materials and experts on a wide range of public health issues, to respond to requests from television writers, producers, and researchers, and to ultimately connect them with experts who can provide factual information. Rather than serving in lieu of paid consultants to the shows, the program ensures accurate depictions of health issues even when no such effort would have been made otherwise on the part of the entertainment professionals.
During House consideration of the Labor-HHS bill, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) successfully offered an amendment to eliminate funding for the program. I urge you to oppose any similar effort in the Senate.
According to the 2005 HealthStyles (Porter Novelli) study, nearly six out of 10 (58%) regular television viewers report learning something about a disease or how to prevent it from a daytime or primetime drama. More importantly, nearly three out of 10 (28%) regular viewers took one or more actions as a result of a television health storyline, such as telling someone about the health topic, calling a hotline or visiting a clinic.
Under the guidance of the CDC’s Entertainment Education Program:
• More than 400 television episodes contained public health information, including more than 82 major storylines
• 11 shows ran some combination of informational PSAs, info spots, and toll free numbers
• 28 storylines were evaluated for effect on viewing audiences
• More than 200 links to public health information were provided to show websites for their viewers
The entertainment education approach works. Up to 20 million viewers may watch a single T.V. show, and they act on the health information they receive. It would be a public health tragedy for this highly successful program to lose its funding.
Sincerely,
Please pass this information along to other entertainment education professionals and social marketers you know so that the entire field is not dismissed offhandedly as a “boondoggle.” The House wasn’t paying attention. Let’s make sure that the Senate is.
Technorati Tags: CDC, entertainment education, senate, HHS, social marketing
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 11, 2007 | Blog, Technology
I read a story in the paper this morning that gave me a giggle and made me wonder if someone was pulling the reporter’s leg. ICANN, the official internet naming agency, is starting to test using domain names written in languages composed of non-Roman letters. The 11 languages they are testing are Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. Yes, that does say Yiddish. Not Hebrew, the language of scores of the highest of the high-tech internet entrepreneurs, but Yiddish. These languages were chosen “based on the online communities that have expressed the most interest in and need for non-English domains.”
Are there really octogenarians and Chasids clamoring for the ability to surf the web in Yiddish? Are the Judenrein communities of Eastern Europe attempting to preserve the vestiges of Yiddish culture online? Or is it a way to avoid dredging up politicized battles by testing the Hebrew characters in which the language is written while calling it by a more nonthreatening name?
I’m going to go reserve my social-marketing.oy domain name now.
UPDATE (10/15/07): Kieren McCarthy at the ICANN blog responded to my question about why Yiddish was selected. She forwarded what Tina Dam, the manager of that project, told her:
“It was not a case of Yiddish rather than Hebrew. These are two different languages that both utilize the Hebrew script. When we were looking at which language to chose to translate the word test for, and hence develop the IDN TLD, we picked the ones where clear need had been expressed.
“However, the list of the eleven was up for comments and review and we had expected it to be expanded with a few additional languages that communities around the world would like to add. We did not get any such requests and so went ahead with the 11 we have today.
“However, please keep in mind that it is not about testing languages – it is about testing a technology. We do need to test the technology on both right-to-left languages and left-to-right languages – Yiddish, Arabic, Persian being the three of the former…
It still amazes me that there are tech-savvy Yiddish-speaking activists out there demanding equal language access.
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 10, 2007 | Blog, Policy, Social Media
I’ve been spending more time on Facebook lately, getting to know how it works so I can use it when I have an appropriate project. The opportunity just presented itself in the form of an advocacy campaign headed up by my blog friend Jeff Harrell. A couple of years ago, Jeff wrote a moving article about a young woman named Suzanne Gonzales.
Suzy was a bright, bubbly young lady with a quirky sense of humor from a small town in California. After she went off to college, she became depressed and turned to the Internet for support in January 2003. Unfortunately, rather than finding people who wanted to help her recover and live a long, healthy life, Suzy posted a note about her suicidal feelings to the Usenet group alt.suicide.holiday. She was met with relentless discouragement against getting help, and over the following months was encouraged by members of the group to go ahead and commit suicide. This included providing specific details on the best method of killing herself and helping her come up with a plan to carry it out. On March 23, 2003, Suzy took her own life, alone in a Florida hotel room. She was one of many such “successes” to come out of that online group.
Yesterday, Jeff announced on his blog that he would be spearheading an advocacy campaign to help pass the bill currently before the House that was inspired by Suzy’s story. H.R. 940, the Suzanne Gonzales Suicide Prevention Act of 2007 (Suzy’s Law), would make it a crime to use the Internet to promote or encourage suicide.
It’s a very narrow and specific law, designed not to abridge freedom of speech or trample on state-specific laws related to suicide. Telling someone how to commit suicide is already against the law in all 50 states, but there is a need for a federal law to take into account the interstate nature of the Internet. A person can only be convicted under this law if they provided information on how to commit suicide to a particular person whom they knew to be contemplating suicide, and when that information was not generally known. The bill is currently in the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, and requires approximately 50 Congressional co-sponsors to make it to the next step in the process (it currently has 3 co-sponsors).
Jeff has created a striking website to serve as a home base for this advocacy effort (all work on this campaign by Jeff and others is on a volunteer basis). He has made it very easy for people to learn more about the issue, the legislation, and how to help. The main push right now is for people to call to urge their Representative to sign on to H.R. 940 as a co-sponsor of the bill. He provides a zip code look-up to find your Rep’s phone number, along with a two-sentence script that you can use if you’re not sure what to say.
I suggested to Jeff that he use Facebook to get the word out about this campaign quickly and efficiently. It seems like the kind of issue that Internet-savvy, particularly college-age, Facebook users would be interested in supporting and sharing with their friends. When I found out that Jeff was not on Facebook, I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to set up a Facebook group and learn more about promoting a campaign via a social networking site. The page went live this morning, and includes:
- an introduction to Suzy’s Law
- campaign contact information
- an action request to call Congress
- a pointer to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline for people who might find the page because they or someone they know is suicidal
- additional resources about suicide prevention
- photos of Suzy
- links to the story Jeff wrote about Suzy and to the website her family created in her memory
- a discussion board with the starter topic of “Have you ever had a friend who was suicidal? What did you do?”
- and a post on the Wall about National Depression Screening Day, which is tomorrow, Thursday October 11.
I invited my Facebook friends (almost 50 people) to join, and Jeff posted a link to the group on the campaign blog. I left messages on about 8 or 9 other Facebook groups related to suicide prevention, depression and mental health inviting their members to join our group. By the end of the day, we had 17 members in the group — the majority of whom were not from my own network. It’s not a huge number, admittedly, but I will be watching with interest to see how quickly it increases. I’ve had my jealous eye on the “Support the Monks’ Protest in Burma” group, which currently has a whopping 397,000 members and increases by about 17,000 a day (if that’s how often the “new members” feature is updated). I’m looking to that as an example of how to get a group to spread.
If you are on Facebook, please join our “Support Suzy’s Law for Suicide Prevention” group and invite your own friends to join as well. If you’re not on Facebook, it’s free, quick and easy to become a member, and then you can join the group. You can also add me as a friend (here’s my profile – viewable once you have a Facebook account).
Let’s make sure that other young people like Suzy are not persuaded by sick strangers that suicide is the best answer, and then coached on how to take their own lives. If you live in the U.S., I hope you’ll get involved by making that quick and easy phone call to your Representative. And if you live outside the U.S., you can help us by spreading the word to your American friends. Thanks!
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
