Communications / Public Affairs, Communications
New ‘Research4Life’ Umbrella Brand Launched
Shira Tabachnikoff
Corporate Communications, Elsevier
The HINARI, AGORA and OARE cooperative public-private partnerships (PPPs) between UN agencies, STM publishers, universities and university libraries, philanthropic foundations and technology partners enjoy well-established reputations among some specific target audiences, including institutes, librarians and users. Partners have launched a new umbrella brand dubbed ‘Research4Life’ to embrace the three key United Nations-led initiatives which offer research for free or at little cost to developing nations.
However, those involved with promoting these programs often encounter difficulties when trying to explain them effectively. While there are distinct messages and goals for the individual programs, there is also a great deal of cross-over. The Research4Life umbrella brand is designed to enable partners to promote the three programs to audiences who may not be completely familiar with them, including local and international media, governments, funding bodies and new partners.
Just as nonprofit organizations often seek to unite diverse local chapter needs with a headquarters operation, by allowing room for chapters to share a brand identity while demonstrating brand relevancy to their own specific audiences, Research4Life seeks to unite the UN-led programs with a single message to make the shared overarching goals of the three programs easier to communicate and understand.
The term Research4Life encapsulates perfectly what the UN-led programs are about and it was greeted enthusiastically by the annual HINARI-AGORA-OARE General Partners Meeting, hosted by the National Academy of Sciences in Washington recently.
As part of this new branding initiative, the PR team, comprised of communications representatives from the partner companies including Shira Tabachnikoff at Elsevier, Eric Merkel-Sobotta at Springer, Emily Gillingham at Wiley-Blackwell, Kimberly Parker at WHO, Claudia Toth at Microsoft, Mohamed Atani at OARE, and Maurice Long at STM, has developed messaging, PR and marketing tools to help all participants involved with the programs to communicate about these successful partnerships in a clear, unified and effective manner.
Research4Life is also launching an online platform (www.research4life.org), with the support of Microsoft, for the media, funding bodies and potential new partners, as well as a community where all those interested can share and collaborate about the programs.
Feedback from researchers and academics in the developing world ranked lack of access to subscription-based journals as one of their most pressing problems. And until recently, many institutions in the developing world have been relying on 20 or 30 year old books for their research and teaching and have little or no experience of using the internet.
Research4Life’s scientific resources advance economic development and human welfare in developing nations by providing over 4,500 institutions in developing countries with access to global scientific, technical and medical research information for free or very low cost. An impact analysis, conducted by Elsevier, has shown that researchers in the countries benefiting from the health program have begun to publish their findings in international peer-reviewed journals at a rate that is well in excess of the increase seen in the rest of the world - 63 percent growth compared to 38 percent in the developed world.