Communications at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: Turning Up the Volume, Adjusting the Frequency

The recently published 13th volume of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation anthology series, To Improve Health and Health Care, contains a chapter written by Fred Mann, RWJF assistant vice president for communications, and David Morse, vice president for communications, outlining the foundation’s approach to strategic communications, and how it has changed considerably over the past several years.

In 2003, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began to articulate the idea that it was in the business of fostering social change and that this could be done most effectively by advancing public policies that better promote health and health care. Around the same time, communications technology began to explode as the Web took off, e-mail became the norm, and search engines such as Google cranked up their power. The changes in the Foundation’s approach to policy and the arrival of new information technologies led it—perhaps even forced it—to reconsider its communications strategy and make adaptations that would make it appropriate for the times. In this essay, Mann and Morse present an insiders’ view of why it was necessary to develop a new strategy, how the strategy evolved, what its main elements are, and what challenges remain.

http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/4230.pdf