Communications/Information Dissemination

“The writing is compelling and puts you there. When you read the lead on street outreach programs, you feel like you’re out there on the street with the young people. Very powerful, very effective writing.” —APEX Awards for Writing Excellence Judge’s Comments for The Exchange: News from FYSB and Youth Services Field

Fifty seconds. In today’s bite-sized world, 50 seconds is all the time our clients have to educate, inform, and make their message heard before their audience moves on to something new.

JBS specializes in making those 50 seconds count.

And once we’ve engaged the audience, we hold their attention with crisp writing, attractive graphics, and functional layouts that help audiences extract useful information easily and quickly.

Crafting the message

• Writing and editing. JBS offers award-winning science writers, health communication experts, and journalists to make crucial communications accurate and engaging. Since 1997, JBS has earned 17 awards in writing categories.
• Culture and diversity. JBS’s Center of Excellence in Language, Culture, and Diversity ensures the message can be understood by nearly everyone, regardless of the language they speak or how long they’ve been in the United States.
• Literacy. JBS can assess a client’s audience and tailor its message to a reading level appropriate for the intended audience.

Designing the image

• Graphic design. Our Design Center has won more than 50 awards in the last 11 years for excellence in print, Web, and multimedia design. Our clients appreciate that we produce award-winning materials that reflect well on their agencies.
• Web site. A compelling Web site is simple, useful, and fresh. Our Web designers know how to keep users returning again and again. We are experienced in search engine optimization and have ensured our clients’ sites top billing on the leading search engines. We invite you to search for Alzheimer’s disease or youth and families—chances are very good that the sites we have produced for our clients will come up.
• Online learning. Our Instructional Designers can turn content knowledge, best practices, and practical steps that support adoption of new behaviors into online courses that benefit an entire field. And we offer free continuing education units through several national accrediting bodies—a major incentive for professionals and an important strategy for supporting our clients’ workforce development efforts.

Working with clients

• Not sure where to begin? Our Marketing Communications team helps clients identify their goals, develop strategies, and evaluate outcomes.
• Community building. Our online tools make collaboration easy and reaching consensus as painless as possible.

	What We Do & Why We Do It: Spotlight on NIDA Networking Project Recently, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) presented a challenge: help researchers from 230 sites across the nation work together to accelerate scientific discovery about drug abuse and addiction. Our response? The NIDA Networking Project (NNP), a Web portal that helps scientists from 14 NIDA research networks find one another, swap data, and share expertise. The portal includes an interactive map that makes it easy for researchers studying drug-related HIV infections in New Mexico to reach out to others looking at similar topics in, say, Connecticut, California, or even Canada. “Whether you’re a prevention or treatment practitioner, a health professional, a researcher, or a policymaker,” says Marcia Meth, NNP Director, “the NNP site has something for you. It’s your one-stop source for network locations, expertise, Web sites, and resources.” Thanks to a targeted marketing plan, almost 400 scientists and other collaborators have registered to use the site in the past year. That’s 400 researchers who can now pool their wisdom and resources to spur scientific discovery, drawing the country that much closer to being completely drug free. “I think the JBS team has done an awesome job in taking NIDA’s goals and ideas and producing an exciting and user friendly Web site.” —Government Project Officer, NIDA, National Institutes of Health (NIH)