Communications Resource Hub

This resources provides guidance on creating effective communication strategies through understanding target audiences, communication avenues, and developing community profiles. It also provides a table of communication channels, detailing their suitability for different messages and audiences to ensure effective reach and engagement.

The Alliance for the Public's Health brings partners together to protect and strengthen the conditions that help communities thrive. It is a multi-sector coalition of networks working to advance public health and equity through strategic communications, advocacy and partnerships. The Alliance creates space for those partners to connect, align their efforts and move forward together.

Speak for Health campaign: State-by-state factsheets. Public health funding impacts communities in every state across the country. Click on your state to find out where it ranks on public health issues. All state fact sheets are downloadable PDFs.

A resource hub for national public health - APHA, in coordination with its members and state and regional Affiliates, works with key decisionmakers to shape public policy to address today's ongoing public health concerns. Find resources about breaking down political buzzwords, data on the Affordable Care Act, explanations about policy briefs, webinars on advocacy, lobbying and education, and more.

PHERN, or the Public Health and Equity Resource Navigator, aims to help changemakers navigate over 3,000 resources focused on improving the public’s health, advancing equity, and building a resilient, robust, sustainable public health system for the future.

This database includes resources that supports, equips, and advocates for state and territorial health officials in their work of advancing the public’s health and well-being by providing capacity building and technical assistance in a variety of areas.

This resource discusses how effective public health communication requires more than just careful language, but includes a fundamental shift in design and delivery to address health inequities. The framework emphasizes recognizing diversity as a driver for better communication, empowering marginalized groups in decision-making, and explicitly naming systemic oppression as a root cause of health issues.

This toolkit provides research-tested messaging strategies and practical guidance to effectively explain public health initiatives and their benefits to communities. The resource aims to bridge the communication gap, build public trust, and make the vital role of public health tangible and relatable.

Call to Action Monthly Newsletter by Harvard Center for Health Communications provides practical tips, events, and resources for building strong health communication skills.

This resource database shares practical resources for improving public health marketing and communication skills. Resources include how to communicate clearly, advocate for public health effectively, engage with reporters and the media, build social media skills, and more.

This Harvard publication discusses how researchers lead experiments in 84 countries to test whether public health messages stressing positive benefits of protective behavior work better than those that warn of risks.

This document, developed by Human Impact Partners and the Right to the City Alliance, aims to educate professionals in the public health and housing sectors about community organizing and power building. This project aims to show how community power catalyzes, creates, and sustains conditions for healthy communities. The resource seeks to deepen understanding of how community power building can advance housing justice and combat health inequities.

This resource provides guidance, tools, and examples on ways public health and medical professionals can set themselves up for success, make decisions on when they need to act to address health-related rumors, choose which actions and approaches might be useful to their audiences and information needs, and evaluate how their efforts are working.

This database provides resources and webinars on quality improvement and performance management, community health assessment planning, communications, health equity, and more.

The "Marvelous Math Club," an afterschool program in a predominantly Black community, integrates math and psychology to foster asset- and justice-based thinking. This collaborative initiative, born from community requests, centers on students' experiences and builds a safe, culturally responsive learning environment. The club aims to empower elementary-aged students as "Math Leaders" by focusing on their strengths and promoting self-integrity.

This toolkit serves as a foundational guide for local health department professionals seeking to engage with policymakers. It aims to demystify communication with members of Congress, empowering users to advocate effectively for a stronger public health infrastructure and increased funding.

Explore best practices and resources to foster the expansion and sustainability of evidence-based health promotion programs. Resources include marketing and recruitment, strategic partnerships, toolkits, and more.

This brief guide will provide some basic practical information to improve your marketing and communications performance. Learn about the fundamental principles and practices of marketing and communications and find activities that you can deploy to create more value for your organization.

This resource helps ensure your website is accessible and easy to navigate for older adults. This rescource contains some tips and best practices that don’t require an advanced web design background.

This resource database provides guides, materials, toolkits, and outreach strategies to promote best practices for marketing health communications.

This Style Guide’s goal is to help you write more effectively and accurately. The information can help you write using correct grammar and plain language so all readers can understand public health communications.

This podcast episode features Trabian Shorters, who introduces "Asset Framing," a cognitive skill that reframes how we perceive and describe individuals and communities. Shorters argues that our societal habit of defining people by their deficits leads to cynicism and undermines efforts for positive change. Asset Framing, conversely, is presented as a simple yet powerful approach that dignifies individuals and fosters more effective, hopeful outcomes by focusing on inherent strengths and potential.

This resource outlines the urgent need to challenge deeply embedded narratives that perpetuate racism and inequality. It stems from a collective effort of diverse organizations seeking to advance popular narratives that promote racial justice and health equity, and expand health and well-being as a human right and inclusive public good for all.

The Public Health Communications Collaborative (PHCC) Academy is a free training hub to support public health communicators around the country. The Academy equips public health professionals with the confidence and competence to communicate effectively with their communities.

This tool is meant to guide racial equity practices in the creation and assessment of sustainability and renewable energy policies and programs. It offers a framework and systematic process to build cultures of accountability and work towards racial equity outcomes in decision-making. Lastly, it provides a tangible pathway for an ecosystem2 approach to operationalizing collective racial equity values.

This guide offers suggestions and principles that support written and digital content development that is inclusive and equity-informed in public health messaging. Inclusive language is essential for creating safer environments for employees and all community members we engage with.

Find trainings and tools in health literacy, plain language, public health risk communications, and more. Including online health literacy courses for health professionals, educating public health professionals about key challenges in the communication landscape, and the fundamentals of communicating health risks.

This article outlines how principles can help public health practitioners communicate more inclusively, considering social inequities and diverse community contexts. The aim is to foster respectful and effective communication that promotes health equity by encouraging a shared understanding and collaborative approach with the communities served.

This tool allows you to type-in or search public health jargon or plain language words and find alternatives and example sentences. This tool offers expert recommendations from CDC’s Health Literacy Council and other agency communicators on how to reduce jargon and replace problematic terms in your materials in order to improve readers' understanding.

A research-based tool to help you develop and assess public communication materials. The Index has 4 introductory questions and 20 scored items drawn from scientific literature in communication and related disciplines. The items represent the most important characteristics that enhance and aid people’s understanding of information.

This free online readability checker automatically calculates the grade level of your writing and highlights sentences that are hard to read. This ensures your readers will understand your message in a single read-through.

This document lists frequently used terms in public health materials and their common, everyday alternatives in plain language sentences.

A tool that provides evidence-based information, data tools, and publications to help identify health disparities, justify program funding, and design educational interventions that address public health community needs.

CDC Foundation developed a set of recommendations and roadmap for building and strengthening partnerships between public health agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs). The report offers a set of transformative and inclusive recommendations to strengthen relationships between governmental public health and communities, framed within The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership, a framework to increase community ownership of public decisions.

This rescource includes tools to identify, challenge, and transform dominant public narratives that perpetuate health inequities. Through hands-on activities and critical analysis, and recognizing how these powerful, often invisible, stories shape our understanding of social justice and health, ultimately enabling you to advance a more equitable public health practice.

This guide was designed for local health department staff who are tasked with communicating specific messages to the public or segments of the public. The guide provides a basic framework to use, including questions to consider when developing communications and evaluation strategies. It also includes considerations for how local health department professionals can incorporate health equity, social justice, and accessibility considerations, including health literacy, into their work.

PHCC offers a variety of resources designed to equip public health professionals with effective communication strategies to enhance public health communications and outreach. Resources include toolkits, messaging guides, and social media materials to help build public health literacy and address topics such as vaccine confidence, infectious disease prevention, and community health.

This guide supports public health communicators in creating messaging to advance health literacy, build trust in your organization as a source of information, and promote overall community health. In this guide, you’ll find plain language principles, simple techniques that can make your communications more accessible, and resources to learn more about plain language to help build your communications skills.

This guide provides foundational insights into the current misinformation landscape and an overview of tools for assessing risk and determining responses.

In partnership with Disability Policy Consortium, this guide supports public health communicators in crafting accessible writing, visuals, audio, and videos. Use this guide to develop accessible and inclusive social media content that connects with all members of your audience.

This guide, available in English and Spanish, helps to evaluate the accuracy and credibility in social media posts and helps to assess the trustworthiness of the content of social media feeds.

Use this resource to help you engage in effective communication about mental health, reduce stigma, and increase the likelihood that community members receive the help they need.

The Layers of Strategy is a resource developed by Berkeley Media Studies Group that outlines this approach to help guide your planning. Learn more about Layers of Strategy below and in our free, two-hour course. This virtual course is part of the PHCC Academy, an initiative of the Public Health Communications Collaborative that aims to equip public health professionals with the confidence and competence to communicate effectively with their communities.

To improve community health outcomes, public health professionals must collaborate with community anchors from other sectors. In this guide, find best communication practices for developing cross-sector partnerships in your community, informed by Public Health Reaching Across Sectors (PHRASES), a partnership of de Beaumont Foundation and The Aspen Institute.

This resource is an abbreviated version of the misinformation guide developed by the Public Health Communications Collaborative, released in 2024 in partnership with the Infodemiology Training Program. It is intended to help public health communicators respond quickly yet effectively to false narratives.

The use of these guiding principles will help communicators develop assets that build trust, relationships, and understanding with priority communities.

Recognizing and incorporating the diversity of people’s cultures, values, and beliefs is essential to effectively communicating with multicultural audiences. The Public Health Communications Collaborative and HCN co-created this guide to support public health communicators in effectively communicating with multicultural audiences. Each of the three sections offer strategies and tools to help you create materials that build stronger relationships, increase credibility, and improve health outcomes.

This is a inclusive comparative resource that includes publications, data and statistics, infographics, maps and more that focus on rural health. These resources may be useful for grant writing, research, state-level contacts, comparing state policies, and finding data sources by state.

A resource database with guides and toolkits to help build effective community health. By learning from programs that are known to be effective, you can make the best use of limited funding and resources. Toolkits are developed based on a review of rural programs and initiatives and an extensive literature review, to identify evidence-based and promising models.

This resource highlights the unique challenges faced by the LGBTQ community residing in the South. Based on a survey of 4,146 individuals, it details the escalating discriminatory legislation targeting LGBTQ individuals, particularly youth, impacting their access to vital resources and contributing to heightened mental health struggles. The report underscores the importance of inclusive language in addressing the compounding stressors experienced by LGBTQ Southerners.

A health education resource database with access to easy-to-understand health education videos on numerous topics, including community health, health worker trainings, childhood development, common health conditions, trauma-informed interviewing, and more.

Evidence-based resources are published reviews of intervention evaluations and studies to improve health. Find resources sorted by health conditions, health behaviors, population groups, systems, and social determinants of health.

This video series explores historical trauma experienced across generations due to events like genocide, slavery, and forced relocation. It explores how these traumas manifest as higher rates of mental/physical illness and substance abuse in affected communities, emphasizing that historical trauma is an ongoing issue. The series discusses how reconnecting with cultural practices, processing grief, and creating new narratives can foster healing and resilience within these communities.

Access to free virtual seminars and recordings with expert speaker panels focused on numerous public health topics.

This guide aims to help data professionals integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into their work. It encourages intentional consideration of how data sources and communication can impact people and communities.

The WNC Health Communicators Collaborative is a group of public health communicators from the westernmost 18 counties of North Carolina + EBCI, working together to build communications capacity, expertise, and infrastructure. Together, we support regional preparedness, health promotion, resource sharing, educational opportunities, capacity connection, streamlined systems of communication, and most importantly, relationship building.

The goal of this social media calendar is to provide our regional health departments with a 12 month social media "road-map" that makes it easy communicate important, relevant, and timely informaiton to residents. One of the focal points to keep in mind while reviewing and using this tool is that all posts should promote respective organizational services or events.

Spreadsheet with list of Public Health newsletters sorted in tabs for national, state, local/regional, and funding opportunities

Communicators need reliable channels for reaching decision-makers, disseminating messages and distributing materials. This article focuses on identifying and utilizing effective communication channels to ensure messages are accessible to diverse audiences.

This guide provides a foundational framework for local health department staff to develop, implement, and evaluate public health communication plans. It emphasizes integrating health equity, social justice, accessibility, and health literacy into communication efforts, offering practical questions and considerations. The resource also supports local health departments in meeting Public Health Accreditation Board standards.

This clinical report addresses parental concerns about vaccine safety and necessity, ranging from hesitancy to outright refusal, despite vaccines' proven impact on child health. It aims to equip readers with an understanding of vaccine uptake determinants, the financial implications of vaccine hesitancy, and effective communication strategies for addressing specific caregiver concerns.

The Diversity Style Guide is a resource to help journalists and other media professionals cover a complex, multicultural world with accuracy, authority and sensitivity. The guide contains more than 700 terms related to race/ethnicity, disability, immigration, sexuality and gender identity, drugs and alcohol, and geography.

This resource aims to help linguists proactively use inclusive language, acknowledging that unintentional stereotyping can marginalize and misrepresent. Ultimately, these guidelines encourage practices that promote diversity, respect, and equal opportunities in all forms of communication.

This article introduces the CDC's Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication, a 2021 web-based resource designed to enhance public health communication. It helps practitioners and their partners consider social inequities and diversity, encouraging them to think more inclusively about the people they serve and adapt to the unique contexts of each community.

This downloadable PowerPoint presentation, led by Sandy Hilfiker and Jaime Dawson of Communicate Health, features real-world case studies demonstrating how to integrate inclusive communication principles into health materials, digital products, and campaigns.

This report seeks to explore the reasons cancer prevention messaging has often not resonated with its intended audience nor had the effect it was seeking. Uncovering what is not working and why it is not working will help public health communications professionals course correct and create effective cancer messaging that resonates with people and spurs them to take preventive action.

Trust is the keystone of successful public health messages. To center trust in your communications, consider the insights and tips in this resource. It can help you reevaluate and refine your communications production approach from planning to execution to evaluation for continuous improvement.

Learning opportunities designed to help you address public health issues, build public confidence, and identify and counter misinformation.

The Alliance for the Public's Health brings partners together to protect and strengthen the conditions that help communities thrive. It is a multi-sector coalition of networks working to advance public health and equity through strategic communications, advocacy and partnerships. The Alliance creates space for those partners to connect, align their efforts and move forward together.

This resources provides guidance on creating effective communication strategies through understanding target audiences, communication avenues, and developing community profiles. It also provides a table of communication channels, detailing their suitability for different messages and audiences to ensure effective reach and engagement.