Shelley Caplan is passionate about the power of health communications to shape behavior for the better. At Urban Emu, she is a Senior Project Director, bringing her deep background in health communications and stakeholder engagement to our work with clients like the United States Department of Agriculture and other mission-driven organizations. We’re so fortunate that Shelley is a part of the Urban Emu team.

Q. You’ve been heavily involved in Urban Emu’s work to adapt MyPlate for various cultures. Can you tell me about that project? 

A. The USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) aims to make MyPlate a household name. It replaced the Food Pyramid more than a decade ago, but only about a quarter of Americans were familiar with it when our campaign began. At Urban Emu, we work to help consumers see themselves reflected in MyPlate and move toward healthier eating patterns. One part of that was to help update the MyPlate food database to reflect various cultural dishes eaten in America. The project I oversaw involved working with a team of nutrition experts from more than 25 cultures to identify foods and ingredients essential to their cuisine, and then with another team, researching nutrient information for those cultural foods and reviewing nutrition information for recipes so eventually they can be added to MyPlate.

I also had the opportunity to be in the planning group and attend several Regional Town Hall meetings led by the USDA’s Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity, Dr. Caree Cotwright, where we heard directly from nutrition educators across the U.S. about how they use or adapt the many MyPlate tools and resources for the communities they serve. In every event, nutrition educators told us their communities needed more multicultural representation, so that became a full-circle experience for me, given that I was already working on an initiative to identify cultural foods and recipes to add to MyPlate–it was highly fulfilling!

Q. What have been some standout moments from those Town Hall experiences?

A. There were many standout moments! One educator who ran an afterschool program said she sent each young student home with a small planter and seeds, and that the kids were excited to taste the vegetables they grew themselves. A side benefit was that the parents also learned about MyPlate through their children. Another nutrition educator held cooking demonstrations with older adults and taught them how making small and simple changes, like tweaking an ingredient when preparing their favorite meal, can increase its nutritional value.

Q. I know you’ve done a lot of cause-based work. And at Urban Emu, our goal is to do purpose-driven work. What draws you to this kind of work, and what projects have meant the most to you throughout your career?

A. I love cause-based work because it promotes positive social change that improves people’s lives. Throughout my career, I’ve worked on a wide range of public health issues, including substance use disorder (e.g., youth tobacco use, steroids and other non-injection drug use, and the opioid epidemic), HIV/AIDS, diabetes, kidney disease, runaway and homeless youth, teen pregnancy, human trafficking, hepatitis, and more. “Social marketing” (which is not the same thing as social media, but can include social media as a tactic) is applying elements of commercial marketing to issues to influence behavior/a lifestyle change that benefits the health or well-being of the individual or society. It takes lifestyle changes to confront many chronic diseases in America, for example, and often, the audiences we target for social marketing don’t even realize they are at risk or have a problem. It’s challenging but rewarding work!

Q. You’ve done a lot of work developing partnerships, working with stakeholders, and promoting community engagement. What do you think it takes to create authentic brand partnerships? 

A. The first thing it takes is finding another organization with a complementary mission or target audience like yours that shares your values. That helps foster a genuine connection and opens the door to countless possibilities. Partnerships should always be win-win, meaning they offer value to both organizations/brands. That value could be access to new audiences to extend your messaging, sharing resources, coming up with innovations, learning from each other’s past experiences, improving the customer experience, enhancing credibility, etc. Partnerships also require transparency and clear communication about goals, expectations, time commitment, budget, and expected hurdles. Then, measuring effectiveness and analyzing results can help the collaboration evolve and improve over time. 

Q. A little birdie (your UE bio) told me you once worked on an event featuring Cyndi Lauper! As a big Cyndi fan, I need to know what that experience was like and what project that was for. 

A. That was a 2014 event for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF). It was a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act, and the client also used it to release the results of a study that revealed more than half of homeless youth initially had been told to leave home by a parent or caregiver. Another statistic shared at that event was that LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to face homelessness than their peers.

Cyndi Lauper was a great fit for the event because she’s extremely passionate about the cause–she has an organization called True Colors United that focuses on the experiences of young people most impacted by homelessness. She spoke from the heart and revealed that she was once a homeless teen herself. She generated a lot of attention to the issue and made the event unforgettable!

Q. As a creative person who enjoys developing marketing strategies, how do you balance creativity with the sometimes stricter limitations of government or non-profit clients? 

A. That’s a great question! Creativity is practically a requirement and slightly easier when your target audience is teens because you can’t expect them to pay any attention if your campaign messaging and materials are stuffy and formal. Still, it’s never “the sky’s the limit” with government agencies’ communications efforts. To navigate the tricky dynamic, I would say you first have to work with the communications office at that agency to understand their specific regulations and concerns. Then, you develop guidelines on how creative tactics can be applied within those constraints.

Q. What’s your favorite thing about working at Urban Emu? 

A. We have extremely talented people on staff, and our founder and CEO is a visionary thinker who practices a human-centered approach. Consideration of the end-users and their context is part of every stage in our work. We’re making a difference.

We’re so grateful to have Shelley on our team to help us shape health communications for the better.
Stay tuned for more teammate spotlights.