Employ Best Practices for Promoting & Evaluating Nutrition Communication Programs and Messages

Effective marketing successfully drives awareness, engagement, and action. Testing and evaluating improves the effectiveness of the communications, engages the target audience, and more wisely allocates investments. In this webinar, featuring principles, strategies, and tips from Chapters 37 and 38 in Communicating Nutrition: The Authoritative Guide, webinar participants will learn how to market communication programs and messages and measure success with testing and evaluation. 

CPEU: 1
CPE Level: 2
Learning Need Codes: 1130, 7120, 1070, 7160
Performance Indicators: 6.1, 11.3, 12.5

Learning Objectives

  1. Describe the role goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics play in a marketing plan
  2. Describe the purposes and methods for formative, outcome, and process evaluation in nutrition communication
  3. Describe several practical strategies for testing and evaluating communication

Speakers

Ilene V. Smith, MS, RD

For over 20 years, Ilene has combined her expertise, knowledge and skills in food, nutrition and public relations to create game-changing communications programs for food companies and organizations. Over the course of her career, Ilene has worked with commodity boards, consumer packaged goods companies, ingredient manufacturers and associations to promote the science behind their brands. Among the companies she has worked with are PepsiCo and its Quaker, Tropicana and Frito-Lay brands, Kellogg, ConAgra, and KIND Snacks. The commodities she has worked with include the Soyfoods Association of North America, National Cattleman’s Beef Association, the Almond Board of California, Avocados from Mexico, the California Strawberry Commission and the California Dried Plum Board. 

Ilene has worked with organizations to develop market demand, manage issues, identify marketing opportunities, drive consumer awareness, develop scientific platforms and create and manage advisory boards. She has also counseled her clients on the impact of consumer, culinary, business and industry trends as well as on regulatory affairs and the political climate. Ilene’s skills and experience are most evident in the critical role she played in KIND Snacks’ petition to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to change the definition of the word healthy as a nutrient content claim, including writing the scientific argument, connecting the brand with high-level influencers and developing the communications strategy. The petition resulted in a ruling in KIND’s favor that changed the game for many industry players by recognizing the healthfulness of foods and ingredients rich in healthy fats.

As a former journalist, Ilene understands how to craft media stories that resonate with desired audiences, whether they are consumers, consumer media, health professionals or influencers, and to develop media strategies that deliver results that meet client objectives. Ilene holds a master’s degree in Nutrition and Applied Physiology from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from New York University. She is a registered dietitian and member of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and past chair of Dietitians in Business and Communications.

Virginia Quick, PhD, RDN

Virginia Quick, PhD, RD, is the Director of the Didactic Program in Dietetics in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds her Bachelor of Science and Doctorate degrees in Nutritional Sciences from Rutgers University and is a Registered Dietitian. She has prior training as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Research Training in Child and Adolescent Primary Care Fellowship Training Program at the University of Minnesota’s Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Dr. Quick has published over 70 manuscripts in peer-reviewed nutrition and health journals with research focused on the etiology and prevention of obesity and disordered eating behaviors, community nutrition interventions, and program assessment and evaluation across the lifespan.