Today’s episode is so timely and so important to listen to. Jenny is joined by Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, Vice President of Strategy and Communications at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri. They have a wide-ranging discussion on the dynamics in the country, and in individual states, post-Roe.
Bonyen breaks down the current deluge of misinformation, and the many challenges that women are facing in a state like Missouri. From an almost total ban, the fear that even many types of contraception will soon be on the chopping block, the pushback on those seeking sterilization services, to fake pregnancy centers staffed by anti-abortion activists. She also talks about Illinois being a critical access state, how they keep up with all the changing rules and regulations, and some troubling trends in digital media platforms whose overreaching algorithms block critical information.
Listen ‘til the end to find out about Planned Parenthood’s Brands Against Bans, teaming with businesses to use their brands to support sexual and reproductive healthcare.
Watch their discussion below or listen to the podcast, We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast.
Other Links and Resources
Abortionfinder.org – Online tool that allows individuals across the country to understand what is accessible in their own states and neighboring states
Regional Logistics Center – Resource for individuals traveling to access an abortion to receive transportation and housing assistance
Connect with Bonyen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonyenlee
Connect with Jenny on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Full Transcript:
JENNY: [00:00:00] Hi, I’m Jenny Bristow and I’m the CEO and founder of Hedy & Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency based in the Midwest. We started the We Are, Marketing Happy podcast because of our passion for improving patients’ access to care. And understanding the innovations and shifts in the healthcare industry are key to making that happen.
Please follow share, and let us know what topics you’d like for us to cover next. Enjoy.
Hi friends. Welcome to the We Are, Marketing Happy podcast, a healthcare marketing podcast. We focus and talk about the technology and innovation that helps improve patients’ access to care. Today I am super excited because I’m joined by, Bonyen Lee Gilmore. She is the Vice President of Strategy and Communications of planned parenthood of the St. Louis and Southeast Missouri region. So welcome Bonyen. [00:01:00] I’m so happy to have you on today.
BONYEN: Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited.
JENNY: So let’s jump right into the question that I’m sure everybody’s interested in hearing about. Sands have been shifting underneath you and the work that you’re doing continuously this year, especially since the most recent Supreme court ruling.
I think what I’d love to do to start off is just talk a little bit about fact versus fiction. There’s so much misinformation and uncertainty out there, right? For patients, as far as understanding what is it isn’t accessible from a birth control perspective, what is, and isn’t accessible if they live in a red state, you know, or an accessible state. Lay it out for us.
BONYEN: Yeah. Thank you for that question because when, whenever there’s big news around sexual and reproductive healthcare, particularly around abortion, there’s a lot of misinformation that swirls. So the fact is today, unfortunately, because of the Dobbs V Jackson case abortion is illegal in the state of Missouri.[00:02:00]
However, misinformation we saw circulate pretty quickly after that decision dropped was that birth control and emergency contraception and IVF are now outlawed. That is untrue. Birth control, emergency contraception, IVF – these reproductive healthcare options are still legal in the state of Missouri.
And they were legal before Roe was overturned and they are legal after Roe was overturned. Now is that to say that the politicians aren’t gonna go after birth control next? Of course that we already know that politicians in Missouri and several other states are already taking aim at birth control. And we know that’s probably next on the chopping block, but for now it remains legal.
It remains accessible in the state of Missouri. Birth control and emergency contraception prevent pregnancy, as you know, and this is often purposely conflated by anti-abortion [00:03:00] politicians to suggest that they somehow end pregnancies. They don’t, they prevent pregnancies, they’re safe and they are legal in the state.
JENNY: So we have listeners from all across the country. So do you have any resources or places online that you’d recommend folks go to be able to understand what they can and can’t access within their own states?
BONYEN: Yeah. So abortionfinder.org is a really handy tool for people to understand particularly how to navigate your way to abortion care.
If you live in a banned state there’s also the Regional Logistics Center work that we do. You can go to PPPslr.org and read about the Regional Logistics Center, which is a case management patient navigation program that we launched at our Illinois health center. As folks may or may not know, Illinois is a critical access state right now.
It is an island. Almost every state around it has either banned abortion or has extremely draconian [00:04:00] restrictions in place. And in the next year, we will see about 14,000 additional patients coming from outside of Illinois, access abortion in Southern Illinois. And so the regional logistics center takes care of travel.
It takes care of lodging. It connects patients with financial aid resources and really. Arranges that wraparound care that is now so critical in the work to ensure abortion access.
JENNY: That’s amazing. I’m such a big fan of the RLC and the work that y’all are doing there. You should be very proud of it. It’s definitely gonna change a bunch of lives.
As we know Planned Parenthood actually does a lot of phenomenal things outside of abortion care. But how do you stay up to date as the sands are shifting underneath you legally regarding what you can and can’t promote in what you can and can’t do?
I mean, especially with your [00:05:00] region, you have so many states right here, and then I know a bunch of other Planned Parenthood affiliates also have multi-state regions. How do you stay up to date?
BONYEN: We have really excellent lawyers. Anybody who works in the healthcare field knows, right?
We can’t operate without our lawyers breathing down our neck every day. And you know, we are really focused on blending the healthcare work and the advocacy of healthcare. And isn’t a political issue. Yeah, it shouldn’t be. But the reality is, is that anti – reproductive healthcare politicians are forcing it into a political space where it’s quite frankly unreasonable to be talking about healthcare provisions with non-healthcare providers.
But that’s our reality, right? And there are tons of medically unnecessary restrictions targeted at people who need reproductive healthcare access, capable people are discriminated [00:06:00] against and targeted at rates that male bodied patients don’t necessarily see or experience. I’ll give you a really good example.
Our organization has an advanced OBGYN program where we offer vasectomies and tubal ligations, and we’ve seen sterilization requests go through the roof since roe was overturned. And what we’re also seeing is a ton of patients who live in rural Missouri, who are getting turned the away for this care by their doctors.
Because their doctors want to make paternalistic decisions for them about if they’re ready to stop having more kids or if they they’re ready to make a decision about not having kids. And so the layers of restrictions and discrimination are real and don’t just pertain to abortion care. They pertain to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive healthcare.
JENNY: I’m in a variety of women’s [00:07:00] groups online. There’s actually a couple of underground spreadsheets going around of OBGYNs who are willing to do sterilization procedures regardless of your age or the number of children that you have. And it is kind of crazy that we live in a world where you have to have a spreadsheet with OBs that are willing to do that.
BONYEN: You know, I just truly don’t even understand why it has to be an underground issue. Black women who established reproductive justice really solidified the idea that every person should have the right to decide whether they want to have a kid, not to have a kid and to raise the kid they have in safety.
And this should be every person’s right – to decide without any sort of judgment from anyone other than that person in their family.
JENNY: I know you have a team that manages digital for you, but I know that Meta and Google have made all of these decisions around what they do and don’t allow on the platform. How have been managing and pivoting that and are there any trends or [00:08:00] things that you’ve seen specifically with these platforms?
BONYEN: Yeah. Okay. I’m gonna tell the audience that Jenny did not pay me to say this, but your team helps us tremendously. Because we are reproductive healthcare experts, but we are not digital marketing experts.
So I couldn’t do it without the Hedy & Hopp team. You did not pay me to say that, but you deserve the shout out. Thank you.
Some of the trends we’re seeing are troubling, right? There’s a difference between intention and impact. And I think a lot of these platforms in the age of misinformation have really tried to crack down on the flow of misinformation on their platforms.
But as a result, instituted some really arbitrary rules that I know your team has to navigate all the time for us. Like when the word abortion is in an ad and then it gets shut down because whatever algorithms and policies that these digital platforms have put in place, and it’s really unfortunate.
The other [00:09:00] the other trend we’re seeing is, and this is a trend that’s been happening over many years is crisis pregnancy centers. These are fake clinics run by anti-abortion operatives. And they disguise themselves as reproductive healthcare providers and centers, and they lure patients in and then hold them there.
So they miss their appointments at Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers. And they really shame and stigmatize patients in their spaces. If you live in the St. Louis area, thrives is a really well known one, but there are thousands of them across the country. And they oftentimes get tax dollars to subsidize their digital marketing.
We see this all the time and it takes an enormous amount of money and work on our behalf to be able to knock them down. But this is a problem, right? Because they are [00:10:00] subsidized by many state governments in order to push their misinformation and they’re able to go through the loopholes and spend millions of dollars to be the top search result.
JENNY: An article just came out today – the day that we’re filming – talking about how additional legislation is now being pushed in a variety of states that actually could hold Meta and or Google culpable for ads served on their platform legally around not only abortion, but certain birth controls or other things that are deemed inappropriate in the legislator’s minds.
So I think we’re facing a pretty rocky road over the next couple of years.
BONYEN: Yeah, absolutely. And some blurred lines and complicated conversations around freedom of speech.
JENNY: Absolutely. I think one of the things that I love that you’re doing is the Brands Against Bans. Talk a little bit about that.
BONYEN: We’re so proud of this new campaign we’re launching in August called Brands [00:11:00] Against Bans. It is an effort to empower businesses to utilize their brands to support sexual and reproductive healthcare. So we know one of the biggest challenges in what got us here to this moment of Roe being overturned is stigma.
People wanna whisper the word abortion. We know the majority of Americans and voters in this country support keeping Roe and support abortion access. Yet, we don’t hear it enough. We have to remember that the anti-abortion groups are a loud minority of people that has led many to believe that abortion should remain in silence and it shouldn’t.
And so the Brands Against Bans campaign is really our effort to empower businesses, to get loud on their support for sexual reproductive healthcare and rights. [00:12:00] And we are working with businesses to start a list of preferred businesses that we can share out with our supporters. So if you want to know where you can go holiday shopping and support your mission and values – we are working on that list.
So we’re starting that in August and we’re really proud of it. And Jenny, you’re an example of this. So you – being a woman owned business and being really out front on your support for sexual and reproductive healthcare does wonders to shatter stigma.
It’s incredibly important at this time to normalize sexual and reproductive healthcare. One in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime. It is a normal part of reproductive healthcare. We have to stop othering abortion care and we have to start normalizing it.
JENNY: Yeah, I agree. And [00:13:00] I’m so excited to share the link for the campaign in the show notes.
Last question. I know quite a few people that wanna support Planned Parenthood and the work that you’re doing. If they wanna just give, how can they give and how can they donate in a way that the money will specifically go to helping people that do need access to abortion care?
BONYEN: There’s several ways. So first you can go to PPSlr.org and go to the Regional Logistics Center website, where you can give directly to patient navigation work and ensuring that patients have travel, lodging, and other financial aid resources. The other way you can give is to donate to abortion funds.
There are abortion funds in all of these states and abortion funds directly subsidize the abortion care. Because in many places, there are private and public insurance bans. So the vast majority of people who need abortion access have to pay for it out of pocket and abortion funds do an amazing job offsetting those costs for [00:14:00] people.
JENNY: That’s wonderful. We’ll include some links in the show notes to make it easy for people. So Bonyen, thank you so much for being here and thank you for the important work that you do.
BONYEN: Thank you for having
JENNY: Well, thanks for tuning into this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, we’ll see you on the next one.
Take care.
Welcome to the first episode of the We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast, hosted by Jenny Bristow. Jenny is the Founder and CEO of Hedy and Hopp, a healthcare marketing agency based in the Midwest. Today, Jenny welcomes Annie Haarmann, Head of Consumer Experience, North America at Reputation.
On this episode, Annie breaks down how different health systems are responding to technology advancements in order to improve patient’s access to care. She outlines technology that is changing patient’s journey such as Google’s knowledge panel and local three-pack to natural language processing and artificial intelligence to determine emotions such as fear, optimism and anger.
We also talk about how health systems have been regrouping after many marketing budgets were slashed during Covid and the long-term impact to the growth of virtual care.
Annie discusses the importance of real relationship building with vendors, being brutally honest about your own weaknesses, talking about things that are broken, and using metrics that matter.
Watch their discussion below or listen to the podcast, We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast.
Connect with Annie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniehaarmann/
Connect with Jenny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Full Transcript:
Hi friends. Welcome to We Are Marketing Happy – a healthcare marketing podcast, where we talk about the technology and innovation that are improving patient’s access to care. I am super excited to have with us today, one of my long time friends, Annie Haarmann, Annie is the head of Consumer Experience North America at Reputation.
Welcome Annie. Thanks Jenny. I’m so glad to be here and glad to be one of your long time friends. [00:01:00] Same. So we have so many different directions and things that we can talk about. You have been such an innovator in healthcare the entire time that I’ve known you. I’d love to start off talking a little bit about technology.
So, I know that in the past you were actually working at a healthcare system, and now you are at a technology vendor. So you’ve seen a lot from both sides of the spectrum. What technology have you seen that you think has most improved patients access to care?
Yeah, I think that there’s no way to have a conversation about care access without talking about the big elephant in the room, Google. As you know, it’s the single biggest technology that has impacted the customer journey, What we now call doctor Google or the idea that, you know, we’re all as consumers seeking answers to questions about our medical conditions.
And, uh, I remember hearing from, from [00:02:00] Google recently that the percentage of healthcare related search related to symptoms is 81%. So, 81% of healthcare searches is just a consumer, trying to figure out their symptoms, whether it’s, you know, what is a wrist sprain versus a broken bone or COVID symptoms, are taking them through what we used to call a marketing funnel.
And now we just kind of call that a consumer journey. And I can search my symptoms. I can understand my treatment options. I could even look at reviews from other people who have my same symptoms or conditions and have seen that provider. I can select a provider based on their feedback and it’s all right there within the Google ecosystem right there in the knowledge panel or that local three pack.
And, you know, we used to have these debates. I’m sure you [00:03:00] remember was what are we gonna put on our homepage? What’s the right thing to feature on that homepage of the website. and that page doesn’t ever matter if you can’t get the consumer to come to it. And increasingly Google is going to intercept those patients.
They want them scheduling right there within the Google results. And why would a consumer ever go to your website if they can get everything for right there? And this idea of zero click conversion is not just a nice to have anymore. It’s the standard. And if you are not optimizing for that, then you’re missing out on the single best access point for your patients.
I remember it was in 2019. You were speaking at HCIC and I remember sitting in the audience and you actually walked through a patient experience. The experience was your own cause you weren’t feeling well, you had to go urgent care or something. And so I remember you actually screenshotted and documented how, what the query you [00:04:00] did, the search results that you received, the way that you were able to book an appointment.
And it was such a great, true representation. How easy it is to find care whenever providers and systems do it correctly. Yeah. I vaguely recall that. I think that was my data science experiment with an N of one but it’s, it’s true that as consumers of healthcare, we care what that experience is going to be like for other consumers of healthcare.
It’s the only product or service that. Truly, every person is going to have some kind of experience with it. And if we don’t make that better, then we’re not doing a service to society as a whole. Something that makes me really excited about – the idea of making access easier is that it’s not just a marketing thing.
It’s really about treating humans the way that they wanna be treated and make it [00:05:00] easy for them to get the care that they need in the time that they need it.
I totally share that same passion, as you know. So what do you think is next? What next technology innovation or platform or tool is going to be next?
Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s funny, there’s a lot of advancement that has happened in the last couple of years in digital. And we’ve seen certain platforms like virtual care that used to be this loss leader that healthcare systems didn’t really know what to do with, or put it over in the innovation corner.
And all of a sudden we had a need to scale all of that and make it actionable immediately. People who couldn’t leave the house. And so I do think that it’s a really exciting time to see the shift from this idea of healthcare access as a marketing thing, to healthcare access as a consumer experience [00:06:00] thing and, and driving those access points.
You know the best thing that I have seen come out of healthcare innovation is really what we’re bringing in from other industries. So if you take a concept like healthcare consumerism, other industries have already nailed consumerism, they didn’t have the same kind of challenges that we did in healthcare.
And they were able to really hone in on some of those things that we’re now just catching up to. The thing that comes to mind for me as the future is natural language processing or NLP. When we talk about AI and healthcare, we’re always focused on clinical uses. But there are also a lot of non-clinical uses for AI in marketing and you know, years ago, you probably remember it was so exciting just to see on our social media reports, that we could get a percentage of how many positive [00:07:00] comments, how many negative comments.
And then there was the neutral comments, which was, you know, sort of silly because it was the biggest of, of all the groupings. But now, NLP has gotten so advanced. It learns over time that we can start to pull out emotional components, like fear and anger and trust or optimism.
And those are really important emotions to understand when you are trying to change behavior. How are you going to motivate someone to take action, to schedule that mammogram when, most of the conversation around that topic is fearful? How can you allay those fears with the marketing that you’re doing?
How can you eliminate some of the barriers that cause anger and and make it easier for them to access the care and to do the follow up care that they need. So it’s not just about what is [00:08:00] the story we tell it’s what is the story we tell that will drive someone to action and we can do that by paying more attention to the natural language processing technology that is available to us.
How far out do you think we are from mass adoption?
Ooh, that’s hard to say. I see that a lot of my clients are very excited about it and they say, oh, that’s so great. I want that. I wanna see it, but we haven’t reached the point of fully actioning that information. So a lot of them are just starting to wake up to the fact that we can even provide this kind of information and you know, realizing they can drill down to that level and see, even based on a service line or an individual provider or a region of our service area. And so I think right now we’re at the awareness stage [00:09:00] of things.
It’s funny you bring this up because this is something we talk to a lot of our clients about. There are laggards who are sort of just coming onto some of the digital marketing things that we would probably consider standard in other industries. There’s the middle of the pack, which is the ones who are understanding the information, but maybe actioning on part of it. And the leaders, which I would say is a smaller elite group of health systems have really figured out how to action this information.
They are drilling into the data, not just a, oh, it’s nice to know this thing. It’s oh, here’s the action we’re going to take. Because of this thing that we learned, and here’s what we expect the result to be. And they’re testing that and they are building marketing campaigns with that in mind. And it’s really exciting to see some of the, the, [00:10:00] the changes that it is resulting in for my clients.
So you and I we’ve been in this industry for a long time. Right. Things change every month. How do you stay abreast of new technology? Are there any trainings or any resources that you’ve found or used over the last year that have been really helpful?
Yeah. I read everything. I listen to all of the podcasts. I am a digital hoard. I’ve got probably. 40 episodes of various podcasts that are downloaded into my phone. And when I get on a plane and I won’t have wifi access, I just plug in and just learn as much as I can. And the way that I learn about what’s going on, isn’t so much from a technology stand.
I wanna hear what healthcare system executives are [00:11:00] saying. I wanna hear from that medical group leader, I wanna hear from that chief nursing officer if iit matters not what the latest tech is, or if it doesn’t. Actually get to the heart of what is causing pain for healthcare system leaders. And I tried to always put that at the center of my conversations with them and ultimately the healthcare consumer at the center of what they need from me.
And so what I would recommend is – don’t worry about the latest technology podcast or signing up for a technology, event or subscription. What you should really listen to is what are those executives talking about? And you can find that through, you know, all of the, the trade publications, you can subscribe to the podcast versions of [00:12:00] those and just listen. When you hear the same challenges repeated over and over, because that’s what has to come first.
It’s not the technology. It’s the problem. Absolutely. Oh, I love that answer. I love it. So something that I really wanted to dig in with you is talking about budgeting in marketing. I feel like it has been well, I know it has been a, quite a rocky couple of years for healthcare providers. A lot of their budgets were slashed to nothing during COVID and now everybody’s rebounding.
Some people are doing more than they were before as an attempt to be able to make up some lost ground. How have you, and how have your clients tackled budget planning post pandemic?
Yeah, I, I work with clients of all sizes. Um, some that have very small budgets and some that have enormous budgets and it doesn’t matter what [00:13:00] the budget is.
You need to focus early on the value. You know, for a lot of health systems, they have finance processes or certain protocols where you go through an approval of whatever investment you wanna make. And you have to show the value of that, and you need to challenge your partners, or your vendors, if they aren’t a true partner, they’ll do this with you.
If they’re a vendor, they might but, challenge them to give you metrics that matter and your vendors don’t tell you what metrics matter. You tell them. I remember years ago when I was a customer, I was a purchaser of lots of technology. I was having a conversation with, with my boss about a [00:14:00] proposal that had just come through.
And our sentiment was they came in and tried to tell us what our problems were, but they didn’t ask us what our problems were. They just told us what they were. We know what our problems are and so we know the priorities. And so when you can tell your outside partners what those things are, and sometimes it can be difficult to do – a lot of marketing leaders don’t wanna share that level of detail with their outside partners, and it can only help you because then they know what matters.
They know what they need to track, and they know whether they are delivering value. And so create those deep relationships early – figure out what your processes are know what you need in order to show value to that budget. And then, challenge your partners, cuz at the end of the day, you know, if your agency isn’t reporting on real metrics, like incremental new [00:15:00] patient revenue on appointments scheduled, if there’s still leaning on views or impressions and, and that’s it, you know, that’s not gonna help you because all the impressions are not going to mean anything.
If you don’t get one appointment out of it and that one appointment means nothing. If you can’t then attribute that appointment to something that your marketing team did.
I love that answer. And I think that is early the foundation for the most successful relationships is candor. That’s candor honesty, some brutal real conversations. And, you know, we had a lot of candor when, when I was your client, I don’t know if you’re revealing that on this podcast, but, but yeah, that’s very, very important. And it is for you, I’m sure that you’ve had clients who didn’t tell you exactly what was going on or tell you all of the details you needed to know in order to add value.
And it’s almost like, you know, you would come in with [00:16:00] your eyes closed to try to paint the picture for them, but you don’t know what’s important. And when you can be honest about that so you know if you’re off the target or you’re close to the target.
That’s the bullseye. You need that in any kind of relationship. And that’s what I consider to be the difference between a, a vendor, which is just, I pay you money and you give me the thing, versus a partnership, which is, I’m investing in you and we are mutually invested in the success of this outcome.
Completely agree. I think a lot of marketers early in their career feel like keeping some of that information close to the vest is a power play. And I think the opposite is the real power play. The more you can share to allow people to be your true partner and stand up and kind of push the limits of what’s possible because they know they’re actually going in the right direction for you is really when the magic happens.
[00:17:00] Totally agree. Well, Annie, thank you so much. This was such a fun conversation. I always love hearing your insights. Any final words for our listeners today?
Yeah, I think it gets back to the candor thing. I mean, you know, me I love telling everybody what the problem is because the more people I tell about the challenge that I’m facing, the more likely it is that I’m gonna get a nice set of answers from a variety of people and what I would encourage any healthcare marketers to do is to talk about the things that are broken. Don’t be afraid to talk about those things, because guess what they’re probably broken for some other team too. And maybe it used to be broken and they fixed it, or maybe you have an idea that would help them. The point being, talk about these things, talk to, and talk to people who don’t have the same perspective as you.
I mean, [00:18:00] I learned so much from talking to other departments that were not marketing. And it put things in a better context for me to. To win for the whole organization.
I love it. Well, Annie, thank you so much for joining. I’ll be linking to your LinkedIn in the show notes, if anybody would like to connect.
And for all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. We’ll see you soon.