As part of our work within the NIH Community Engagement Alliance Consultative Resource (CEACR), Community-Campus Partnerships for Health partnered with the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute (Pitt CTSI) to create a free-to-access tool for planning meaningful, community-centered outreach.
Through the community-academic partnership of CCPH and Pitt CTSI, CEACR leadership and staff collaborated to develop the tool, recognizing the need for a published tool that encourages community and academic partners to work together to plan community-centered outreach. As a consultative resource for the NIH CEAL platform, CEACR created the CERPOP Tool to help research teams within the CEAL platform and beyond.
The CERPOP (Community Engagement in Research: Precision Outreach and Planning) Tool is designed to help research teams organize and systematize their community outreach while tailoring it for the community. The tool walks academic researchers and their community partners through a reflective process to design or iterate an outreach plan.
While CEACR created the tool primarily for researchers who are new to community-engaged research, the tool may help anyone working in this field. Experienced teams may branch out and engage a new community, and the tool can provide a systematic way to conduct outreach and orient new staff. This tool is uniquely built for use within community-engaged research contexts and community-academic partnerships.
The CERPOP Tool complements but does not replace engagement and partnership practices. True community-engaged research projects require sustainable partnership, bidirectional communication, and shared decision-making with community members at every step of planning and conducting research. Researchers and community partners should first form partnerships and then use the CERPOP Tool to collaboratively plan community outreach.
Research teams of various sizes may use the CERPOP Tool. Tool users will likely need at least two hours to walk through and complete the entire tool, and both academic and community partners should be present during the sessions. Because this tool is centered on planning community outreach with community partners, it brings community partners to the table and makes outreach efforts more meaningful.
Examples of how the tool may be used include:
- Outreaching to a community of patients with a rare disease
- Planning outreach for a research project for a family medicine practice-based research network
- Helping community and academic partners to find a shared language and align on an outreach approach
- Planning outreach for a community-engaged research project that builds on bench science
- Supporting outreach that occurs as a project transitions to intervention-based work with an implementation science lens
Check out this informational comic about how the CERPOP Tool can help research teams who are experiencing challenges with outreach.
Anyone may download the tool as an interactive PDF for free, and CEACR invites questions about the tool and ideas for how it can be used. Visit the NIH CEAL website to download the tool and fill out our feedback form.
