The REACH team has successfully recruited thousands of participants for investigators across the country. We are here to help you achieve your enrollment targets! REACH takes the time to understand your objectives and audiences, design campaigns that engage and reach your participants. Once the trial is launched, the team continuously monitors and evaluates your campaigns, adjusting strategies as needed to ensure we meet your recruitment milestones.
The REACH Core
Our Mission
The REACH Core’s mission is to:
- Provide end-to-end recruitment management that helps investigators meet their enrollment milestones.
- To tackle recruitment needs head-on, curating individualized outreach campaigns for each study and troubleshooting enrollment issues to directly support investigators with all recruitment-related tasks.
- From audience discovery and study branding to ad design and testing, we aim to implement everything investigators need to successfully recruit for their studies.
Our Services
To help you reach your recruitment milestones or goals, we offer a wide range of services that we manage on your behalf.
General Marketing and Enrollment Strategy Services, to include:
- Study naming, branding & logo design
- Landing page design, implementation
- Prospective participant onboarding process design and implementation
- Print/digital ad design
- Design of other promotional materials (e.g., magnets, pens, lanyards, coasters, bags)
- Registry of prospective participants
- Sourcing of online platforms and their demographic characteristics
- IRB support
Digital Marketing Services, to include:
- Advertising campaign building, launch, and ongoing strategy management
- Advertising platform sourcing
- Audience definition (to specifically target those within your inclusion criteria)
- Performance analytics & reporting
- Diagnostics & troubleshooting
- Influencer marketing
- Ad research: A/B testing, concept testing, ad analytics, co-design
Our Process
We curate our services to each project's needs. Our typical 5-step process is as follows:
- Determine overall recruitment & inclusion goals
- Identify current procedures for lead generation, onboarding & enrollment
- Determine study data collection & follow-up procedures
- Reach agreement on Core services
- Propose budget & timeline for work
- Provide professional written proposal to ensure clear communication
- Design print/digital content & materials
- Launch planned digital campaign
- Facilitate approvals for partner clinics & organizations
- Execute staffing plans for in-person recruitment
- Distribute promotional materials
- Generate & deliver weekly reports on leads generated, eligible & enrolled participants by
venue - For digital: impressions, clicks, click-through-rates, cost per click
- For in-person engagements: Adjust promo materials, seek new partnerships, shift staffing plans
- For digital: Adjust audience characteristics, use new venues, create new content
With each team that requests our services, Core staff will first engage in a discovery process to understand each study, its target populations, and constraints. This process is guided by a detailed consultation interview we conduct with each team. Using these details, we then develop a detailed campaign strategy, including specific platforms/venues, ad concepts, and messengers we believe will be effective in reaching and engaging the intended audiences. We also present this strategy to the team for feedback and, if agreed, develop a written proposal and projected budget. Once all are agreed on this strategy, Core staff will then launch the campaign and monitor its performance, adjusting specific pieces to ensure optimal results.
Our goal is to make recruitment as simple as possible. With our proven, predefined process, there's no need for you to stress—we’ve got it handled.
Why Us?
The REACH Core offers distinct advantages for recruitment support, providing unique benefits that set us apart from other options:
- Individuality and Curation - One size does not fit all - especially when looking for some of the harder-to-reach populations. We create individualized strategies and custom ad campaigns per study, from scratch. This means we take a more considered approach that we have proven can pinpoint your target audience, whilst incidentally saving time and project funds.
- Simplicity - There are no lengthy contracts required to work with us, just pay hourly for our services as you need them.
- Campaign flexibility - We can conduct campaigns on almost any platform and design content that is unique to your study, allowing you to more effectively reach and attract your audiences.
- Keep your leads - Our campaigns send prospective participants through your onboarding process, so you’ll keep and own the data your campaign generates.
- Transparency - We can show you exactly where your leads first saw an ad and when they engaged with them. This is especially important when reporting how your participants were found and where they came from - you won’t be simply sent a data sheet with contact info that lacks important detail.
- Recruitment Training - We work closely with each team throughout the process, communicating any decisions carefully along the way, allowing you and your team to learn more about the basics of digital marketing and participant engagement, so you don’t have to plan to endlessly engage external outreach agencies for the rest of your career!
Fee Structure
As part of our discovery process, we will develop a detailed proposal and total cost estimate that is based on your project’s needs. Below are our hourly rates:
Investigators affiliated with Brown University or Brown University Health: $66.47
Investigators affiliated with other institutions: $105.69
We will estimate the total project budget during the proposal phase of each engagement.
Our Team
We bring over 15 years of combined experience in recruitment management, covering every aspect of the recruitment ‘funnel’. Our expertise spans from graphic design, ad creation, study branding, and website development to survey design, ad campaign strategy, and enrolment troubleshooting. This ensures we enroll participants efficiently and cost-effectively, often in shorter timeframes. We've successfully worked with many populations and demographics, including hard-to-reach groups such as teens and individuals with heavy drug and alcohol use, for example, and have published multiple journal articles illustrating our success in online recruitment.
Meet our team
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Tyler Wray, Ph.D.
Director of the REACH Core, Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social SciencesTyler Wray has led seven NIH-funded grants as PI. He has led important work in the areas of virtual and pragmatic trials and has designed a variety of tools that enable researchers to increase the convenience of their research and engage relevant participants. He has also led original work using web analytics data to identify specific online marketing strategies that are most effective in reaching and engaging harder to reach groups.
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Daniel J. Carr, Ph.D.
Digital Recruitment SpecialistDan Carr has earned professional certificates in digital marketing (Yale) and visual design (Adobe), and has been working with Dr. Wray since 2016. He has led all online recruitment campaigns for his projects throughout that time, to date having engaged more than 70,000 prospective participants and enrolled over 2,000 into Dr. Wray’s ongoing studies. In addition, he has working for 15+ studies with other PIs, both within Brown and at other institutions.