Rebecca Brookes, Social Marketing Strategist

Over the past 25 years, Rebecca built capacity for, trained, or provided technical assistance in areas of healthy sexuality/teen pregnancy prevention, tobacco control, traffic safety, substance abuse, and civic engagement. She has worked with US state health departments, federal Title X programs, the Russian Family Planning Association, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, the New York State Tobacco Control Program, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and International Planned Parenthood among others. She was peer reviewer for a college textbook on social marketing and wrote The Basic Guide to Social Marketing and The Manager’s Guide to Social Marketing.

She directed Real Life. Real Talk®, a campaign to increase balanced talk about sex and health in America in partnership with the Ford Foundation and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She is principal author for an article describing this multi-component, community engagement sexual health/teen pregnancy prevention program featured on the cover of the spring 2010 Social Marketing Quarterly (bit.ly/cuENcY).

She has consulted with family planning professionals from Barbados, St Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago to increase awareness and access to emergency contraception and worked with providers in Central and South America to increase health-seeking behavior in street youth in those countries. She consulted for three years with the New York State Tobacco Control Program to integrate social marketing into all aspects of their workplan and created The Promising Practices Guide, a best practices model for reducing tobacco advertising in the retail environment.  She recently presented a series of webinars on using social media effectively to recruit and retain patients for health care providers.