Kellee: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kellee Waters. I'm with CDC 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, EPICO129. 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 CDC for 16 years. 

He studied mathematics, economics and business. He applied disciplines to building EPIC partnerships. These are a collection of relationships that CDC 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 inappropriateness of partnering with a government organization in the private sector, but when we're talking about emergency response, we're talking about saving lives and that comes first. When we're talking about communication partnerships, it's worth doing and we just work through all of the other potential difficulties. You can seek out specific companies if they serve populations they want to reach, trade organizations. 

We are partners with a couple of pharmacy trade organizations and a couple other organizations as well that serve kind of the larger business community, of course, clinical partners, which I will mention on the next slide and the reason they matter so much is, especially during a natural disaster, during several different kinds of emergencies, they can be different contacts, so pharmacy, grocery store, gas stations are the first place people go that is why they from use to feel partner with. Next slide. So clinical partners is a special topic and C. 

D. C. has its own team devoted to establishing partnerships for emergency communications. 

Public health emergencies can present unique challenges and providing the right information for clinicians can save lives. It can save lives because it can influence what the clinicians do and clinicians can influence the actions their patients take. Developing and maintaining strong partnerships with clinical organizations is critical for successful notification for sharing and training because clinical partner organizations serve more -- they may have thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of clinicians they serve and more than just physicians. 

We share information with the right clinical organizations. You have an excellent ability to reach a large number of people and that is why we have our own separate team for this. Next slide. 

Step three, make connections before an emergency. Sometimes you have to have what we call a just in time partnership, but if you can build your trust, build your relationship ahead of last time means making initial contact, having a discussion to reach an understanding of how each organization operates, how you benefit each other and what your mutual expectations are. We typically do not seek out formal agreements because they become more difficult than they're worth, but for many people it may be help to feel have a memorandum of understanding. 

Next slide. Step four, maintaining connections. This occupies a large portion of my work, it is not just enough to establish the connection. 

You have to make sure you keep it going that means updating and confirming contact information, because sometimes your point of contact has moved on and sometimes you have to re-establish, rebuild the partnership from scratch that means reaching out to them and having conversations. We like to feature our partners in our newsletters. It is a great way to show what excellent partners we have and it is a great way to maintain the relationship and just in general, mutually participating in activities can help maintain the connection. 

Finally, step five where all of your work has paid off, working together during emergencies. The first thing I would say about this is listen to their needs. if you're sharing information to help people, you want the information to be as focused on as possible on the needs of the people you're trying to help. 

Organizations that represent those people can tell you exactly what you need to send, need to share to have maximum impact. Listen to their needs. Obtain appropriate information from other partners, so C. 

D. C. is often the primary generator of information and information products, but not always, and others doing this kind of work may not be the primary generators. 

If you established a relationship with FEMA or HHS or other sources, you know where to get the information, quickly go, get the information and share it with your partner organizations and they are going to share it through their channels. Next slide. to Milwaukee this work, you need to have effective answers, a few simple tips. 

We talked about what partners telling you what their constituents need, which means you have content that will have the most impact. It should be short, should be relevant, give positive action steps and you might need to repeat the message. A lot of this comes from cirque, which C. 

D. C. does a lot about that topic and I would suggest to learn more about creating effective messages. 

Next slide, please. Here are some examples of successful EPIC partnership activities. In 2017, the national community pharmacist association, an excellent partner and excellent organization shared information on pharmacies that were open shortly after hurricane Harvey. 

So this is critical information, didn't have access to them and didn't know where to go, so we took that information, that list, shared it with the EPIC partners and other groups locally, so they could share the information with people in the affected area, so people could access their medications. Another example, C. D. 

C. shared Haitian documents with the organization during the zika outbreak. This organization provides clinical care for Haitians in Florida, so it was a great opportunity to have documents printed in the appropriate language so they could share with pregnant Haitian women to help prevent getting zika. 

Peter from the national disaster interfaiths presented an EPIC webinar about the ways congregations can contribute during emergencies and that was an example of a shared activity that builds a strong connection and we continue to have a strong connection with them. Next slide. So another example, we have created just in time partnerships with those who serve the Congo. 

We reached out to them. We happen to have a staff member from the Congo who helped us with this and we shared information with leaders so they can share the information and some will share the information with friends and family back in D. R. 

C. Next slide. Mere is a picture from working with communication partners in Puerto Rico where we were handing out a variety of information and supplies to help with the zika outbreak, actually. 

Here are lessons we learned from these interactions, working with the partners. Respect the partner's mission. It is a two-way street. 

We're trying to accomplish something, it is not about how they help us. It is about how we help each other. If you go into it with that mindset, it will create a trusting relationship which means the. 

Works during an emergency. Making regular contact, assisting them with their information needs because you may have specific types of information they can use, using their expertise, so just as C. D. 

C. would have expertise in infectious diseases, for example. If we work with organizations that represent people experiencing homelessness, they can provide us with knowledge that we can use and for, ors having an opportunity to use their expertise professionally, especially on a large scale helps build and maintain their high reputations, so it is beneficial on both sides to use your partner's expertise. 

This can be summed up as understanding the entire value of exchange. This is a concept in business, where it is not an exchange of one thing for another. You're providing a lot. 

Our partners may provide expertise, communication channels, a type of validation or vouching for the partners they work with and we might provide critical information for example, access to C. D. C. 

experts. Understanding the full exchange that goes on there really helps perceive the value of the partners that you seek out and can work with. Next slide. 

There are sticking points and these are things to bear in mind. A lot of organizations have controversies, so you have to do background research. Just be careful. 

You don't want to get mired down in something that might cause reputational harm to your organization. Looking out for political sensitivities or strong political bias. We're a public health organization. 

We work with organizations, with partners that some way contribute to the public health, so for us this has not been a major issue, but something to consider. You want to make sure you have the resources to be a good partner and make sure they have the resources to be a good partner, otherwise it winds up being a waste of everyone's time. It is worth considering if there is distrust from any constituents, it might mean you need to go to extra lengths to establish a trusted relationship. 

Language barriers are a huge concern and it can be difficult to measure success. Like I mentioned, sending a message through a network that may go through nodes before reaching somebody, you really don't know. You don't have any means of seeing if it is working. 

You can generally see if your total communication efforts are having some effects. It can be difficult to precisely measure the success of any given activity. A few skills, I am a student of conflict resolution methodology and I recommend that for absolutely everyone. 

Cultural competence and please be sure to check out, if you go to the C. D. C. 

EPIC website, you will see that we had a webinar on cultural competence, but we have a website that provides some information on how to learn and acquire cultural competence because that is a critical part of working with different partners and communicating across the cultural boundaries and languages as needed for reaching your constituency. Next slide. Here are a few partnership resources that can be useful for reaching, here is one for reaching at-risk populations in an emergency. 

Another one that describes principles of community engagement and the CERC chapter on community engagement and I recommend studying the CERC manual if you have time. Next slide. That's it. 

We can start taking questions. 

     Kellee: Thank you, Jonathan. We will transition to the Q&A session. Lisa, can you read the first question? 

     Lisa: Do you have any thoughts about making sure about partners do not feel they are being used in a one-way relationship? Jonathan Lynch: Absolutely. The most important thing is when you are taking action to serve their needs follow through. That's the most important point in all of this. 

I mean, when our partners reached to us for information or help in something they are working on, we don't always succeed, but we always responsible, we always try. We always make sure they know that we're not using them, that we see this as a two-way thing. Also, if you -- if you promote what your partner does, it makes you look good because it shows you have a mindset of wanting to create a culture of cooperation that makes you look good to your constituents and it certainly builds a good rapport with your partners. 

Lisa, next question. 

     Lisa: Thank you very much. Anonymous attendee, can you please explain what is a flat network? Jonathan Lynch: Well, I can. OK, I hope you can see my hands here. 

You start from one point and you go to the next node in your communication network and you go down one more level and down one more level and if you go 50 levels through, that means the message goes through 50, ors before it reaches your target audience that is likely to fail. That's likely -- the message may get corrupted, too many opportunities for failure. If, on the other hand, you have 50 different partners that you're working with and it goes from you to all 50 of them and from them to one more layer down to the constituencies then you're not going through as many layers of communication, which is more work, because you have to reach more partners on the outset of the network, but a much higher probability of success. 

If you want to get deeper into the math nerdiness of it, please e-mail CDC@gov, I'm happy to follow up on that. 

     Lisa: Could you talk a bit about how you engage partners during routine times? Jonathan Lynch: We can. So we actually have taken a lot of time to figure out how we're going to go about doing this. We don't want to just call people and say hey, how it is going, glad to see you are doing well. 

We want to have meaningful interactions. During non, for us what we call a nonactivation period or a pre-emergency period, we engage in a lot of preparedness work, so we engage our partners in the same preparedness work. By doing that, we're constantly engaged with them. 

We're helping them stay at the level they need for when an emergency happens, then of course, we have the trust built up, so I would say during nonactivation find reasons to work with your partners on that preparedness, as well as engaged, shared communication activities. 

     Lisa: Thank you very much. Our next question, can you share phi the role of C. D. 

C. versus state or local partners during national emergencies, particularly as it is harder to reach groups to ensure they don't fall through the cracks? Jonathan Lynch: There is a phrase that all disasters are local. It is not a question of whether or not or C. 

D. C. or local group or state are trying to reach the harder populations. 

We're all trying to reach them. From the C. D. 

C. perspective, we have direct connects to -- connections to a lot of state and local health departments, so we will share information they can share through their channels, but if we have direct channels. For example, I can share information with the Salvation Army who is share the information who just experienced a flood and they are disconnected or they might have something printable, if we have that direct able, we will use it because it is a situation where the communication to save lives is what is most important, so it is not a question of either/or. 

We're working all channels at once. 

     Lisa: Excellent. Thank you. As I offer the next question, I will let you know because it pertains to my work as well, I'm happy to chime in. 

I know it is hard as a government agency to gain the trust of undocumented residents, what techniques do you recommend for communicating with them? Jonathan Lynch: I'm going to defer to Lisa for this, but I'm going to make one quick comment. Sometimes people see government as a monolithic entity, but it is several organizations under one umbrella. It may be possible to build some trust for one part of government even if people have perhaps an intense distrust for government as a whole and I'm going to defer to Lisa. 

     Lisa: Thank you very much, Jonathan. I want to affirm what Jonathan said and on EPIC, we work as a team to get information to our partners. We have a provide variety of partners, but what we have heard time and again the trust-building relationship. 

The people who are active in the communities who are the trusted messengers, they can connect to community member, including undocumented residents to get the necessities out -- get the messages out. As a large government agency, we do not have the ability to connect well with every community across the nation. We do work closely with our partners, especially to find out whether there are communities not being reached, whether there are questions not being answered and we do best to be responsive to those. 

Jonathan Lynch: It helps, too, that if we create a message in a document and we pass that on to a partner organization and they take that mess edge and they pass it to the constituents, it is communication coming from an organization that the target audience already trusts. The helps a lot. I mean they can believe a message even though they don't trust the government as a whole. 

     Lisa: I will add to that, too, the value of communication that is concept that you will see reiterated with CERC and we will share the link at the end of the webinar. If we share a message with our partners and that message is consistent with other partner, people in the community will get the same, accurate meaningful response from multiple places and they are going to find they can trust the message better. Jonathan Lynch: Excellent. 

Next question. 

     Lisa: Frank says he is active in his community in New York, but often feels there is not enough -- forgive my paraphrasing, there is not enough follow-up and he is looking for tips for more active engagement with partners. Jonathan Lynch: It is not something you do by happenstance. It is something you plan out. 

You don't say let's try this or try that. It is something you actually have to make a plan for and execute. One of the things we did with our partners was Luke a plan to reach out to reach out a planned set of questions to verify they are connected and see if we are serving them in the ways they need. 

We had to go to a lot of trouble. Federal Government has the paperwork reduction act. We can't just poll people. 

We have to get permission to do that. We went through the trouble of doing that because it is worth taking the time to do that. Make a plan, incorporate shared activities, things you can do together, incorporate a lot of preparedness. 

Activities because it builds the trust before the emergency comes and finally, if you have a communication channel, talk about your partners on your communication channel that makes you look good. It makes them look good and it is beneficial across the board, OK? 

     Lisa: Our next question, can you provide more information on what a just in time partnership is and how you incorporate them into your planning and preparedness effort? Jonathan Lynch: You can't anticipate everything. You wouldn't have the time to form 2,000 or 3,000 partnerships, so when something unexpected comes, such as having to work on Ebola outbreak in the democratic republic of the Congo, you have to find partners who serve the population that you have never connected with before. The most important factor, you don't know if they trust you, the most important factor is for you to have a great reputation. 

If you have a great reputation and when you numb and talk to them, you are less likely to meet resistance. If it is helpful, it is to form a partnership with a single member or few members in a range of organizations that you want to serve and that person can help promote your efforts. We were very fortunate in the case of DRC to have a staff member from DRC to have connections already that was just a blessing, so that kind of luck won't always happen, but you can form the intermediate kind of relationships to quickly establish trust in a larger set of partnerships. 

     Lisa: Our next question, what modalities are most effective in communicating with partners? Do you use driving them towards websites? Jonathan Lynch: Well, I personally, I prefer to share an e-mail rather than drive them to a website. If they have an e-mail, it is one click away to pass it to someone else, so if I have the information already there, it is easy to pass on. People may or may not click a clink, it is great if people check out what you have, but I personally prefer to have it in front of their face. 

That is the great thing about social media, too, if you're connected on social media or Twitter or linked in and you post something, they can immediately post your posting, repeat their posting on their channels. 

     Lisa: I will add to that, that is one of the places that the cultural considerations come into play. You need to consider, how would your partners like to receive information, but how would people they serve like to receive information and make it as shareable as possible. Jonathan Lynch: I talk about how e-mail is convenient, but you have to look at the practicalities of the situation. 

I mean sometimes you may have to print documents out and hand them out at a grocery store. We have had to do that multiple times sometimes you have to rely on a type of word of mouth. If you're working with an organization that serves people in assisted homes, they might be experiencing decline or other disabilities, so the method of communication may be you share a document with them and they interpret and read the document and simplify and explain to the target population. 

Selecting the modality depends on a lot of factors, but the one I find reduces, seems to maximize while passing on reducing corruption so e-mail is my personal preference. 

     Lisa: I know it is difficult to measure success, but what metrics have you tried to demonstrate your partnerships are having an impact? Jonathan Lynch: Main things, one, they let us know. They reach back and let us know. I would caution against relying purely on numbers because it may be hard to get an exact, precise number, but it is still meaningful to have a partner write back and say I share this through our network. 

We appreciate this. Secondly, there is a whole science around monitoring media, social media even monitoring discussion groups on forums, so if you have some electronic means by which the targeted population communicates, you can monitor that and get meaningful numbers from doing that. It helps if you have someone who is embedded, who can get a general sense of how your information has been received. 

We have a whole research team that tries to provide this type of information. The point that makes it difficult is, was it your partnership communication that was successful or was it is the communication through mainstream media that was successful? This is a difficulty in all marketing efforts that you use multiple points to reach people to persuade them to do something and you don't know which of the points influenced the outcome, but you can observe to see if you did influence the outcome. 

     Lisa: Our next question is what is an expected turnaround time in providing information to partners? Is there a best practice or does it depend on the case? Do you commit to providing updates on a schedule whether or not there is new information? Jonathan Lynch: Certainly, it does depend, but as far as the schedule goes, if you have an event that is changing on a regular basis, if nothing else, you can provide updates on case counts, things like that. It would be questionable to provide an update that says nothing is happening, but -- I'm trying to think about how to word this. We want to keep our partners as informed as we can and so we will make regular contact, try not to go more than a few weeks to make sure we are sharing something to communicate with the EPIC partner, we do that, so even if it is not on a prescribed schedule, we make sure they are well-informed because they expect it from us. 

It is almost like breaking trust if we don't provide something on a semi-regular basis. Lisa, what are your thoughts? 

     Lisa: I would like to add to that one of the basic ideas of CERC, when you're looking information, you want to upinvestigate people with the information that you do, so you can take the opportunity to tell people what you do know, what you don't know and what you're doing to find out, so updating on a schedule, that is certainly on a case by case basis, but as promptly as you're able to and proactively as you're able to even if the information you're providing is here is what we're going to find out. Jonathan Lynch: That is one phenomenon that we discuss in CERC, people believe the worst information. Even if you have a little bit of information, share it right away and people tend to trust you. 

Next question. 

     Lisa: We have time for a few more. Next question is do you have any tips on how to figure out all of the different groups, organizations that you should be reaching out to, for instance trying to reach agencies that serve vulnerable populations? How do you build that contact list? Jonathan Lynch: First, you need -- follow the five steps I described, you need to segment your audience. When you say reaching vulnerable populations that means a lot of things. 

You need to define what that means, older adults a vulnerable population? Are older adults in nursing homes or assistants homes, a vulnerable population? If so, maybe you want to get online and find an organization that serves that industry. EPIC does have such a partner. It is a question of figuring out who you need to reach and what organizations can help you reach those groups and then doing the work to establish that connection. 

     Lisa: I will add to that, as part of the all hazards planning, you will take into consideration what sort of risks are my community like to face and from there that might inform your decisions about which groups might be at greater risks and, therefore, finding organizations that serve those groups. Jonathan Lynch: Don't put it off. Do it now. 

     Lisa: The question about how to build the contact list, sometimes web search is the best way, sometimes connecting through other partners is a good way to do it, whether that is internal or external partners that might have the connections or people that are in your community or outside of your organization that might help you find the right connections. Jonathan Lynch: The great thing about a web search if an organization is -- has enough resources to be a helpful partner they probably have a website presence. Then, of course, partners or people you work with say hey, go check this out and you can learn about them before you reach out to them. 

We have been in a situation where we're considering forming a partnership. We have a meeting and we're like, well, I'm not sure if this is a good match for both of us, so that can be awkward, so doing your research ahead of time online is a good idea. 

     Lisa: Excellent. Thank you. Could you please expound on nurturing relationships and tips to improve that process? Jonathan Lynch: We talk about nurturing relationships, there is building the relationship and repairing any damage that may have been done. 

In terms of billing the relationship, it is about establishing regular, meaningful, activities. It helps to be a personable person, when you do that. In materials of repairing damage to a relationship, I cannot emphasize enough that methodologies and conflict resolution can have incredible results. 

I have used the methodologies to prevent some pretty, what would be otherwise a failed situation. It can make a difference. I personally, if you want good, street-level conflict resolution there is a book called "getting to yes. 

" It is fantastic and it is kind of the basics, but what folks in our situation would be most likely to use. OK? Any other questions? 

     Lisa: How would you manage lone rogue people who are disseminating incomplete or incorrect information? Jonathan Lynch: I would not want to work with them, my goodness. Is it that they are sharing their own information that conflicts with your organization, because if that is the case, I would say discontinue that. Entirely. 

That is not hard to do, explain to them, it sounds like we're coming at this from different angles and is a concern for us, so we're going to discontinue this communication. They might be a great communication partner, but they have some other aspect that they are doing that creates a difficult any for you and in that situation, you have to weigh out the political concerns versus the public health concerns and that can be prominent if you're dealing with a faith organization whose faith may be in conflict with your organization's own standards. It has been our experience that people are more concerned about saving lives and much less concerned about your own reputation. 

OK. 

     Lisa: I believe that may be all of the time we have for questions. If we did not get to your question, we apologize, but encourage you to send it to EPIC@CDC. gov. 

Thank you. Jonathan Lynch: Thank you, everyone. 

     Kellee: Thank you again from me and the entire team for joining us for today's webinar. If you have additional questions e-mail them and today's presentation has been recorded. Feel free to share it with anyone who wasn't able to attend. 

You can earn continuing education for your attendance, please follow the instructions found on CDC. GOV/EPIC and the access code is EPIC 0129 with all letters capitalized. Thanks again, everyone. 

Goodbye. Jonathan Lynch: Goodbye.