As reported in our last year’s annual report, our Network supported an innovative patient-led patient-oriented qualitative research project to understand the motivations and barriers to getting and staying involved in IMAGINE’s main research study, MAGIC study. Given the study’s ambitious recruitment target and long-term commitment, a group of IMAGINE Patient Research Partners (PRPs) co-led, co-designed and executed a qualitative study to better understand the motivations and barriers of healthy controls to participating in MAGIC to inform more effective recruitment and retention strategies. The findings were shared with MAGIC’s Site Directors and Research Coordinators during their monthly meetings to identify pragmatic solutions that could be implemented locally immediately. Furthermore, strategies that were deemed low-cost and high-impact were considered for a national roll-out. As such, this past year, IMAGINE embarked on creating new content to promote enrolment and retention for MAGIC.
(1) Recruitment Videos
A series of three short recruitment videos were created to promote and spark recruitment for the MAGIC Study (Sketch Video, Bacteria Video and Got Poop). These videos are animated and are only 30-seconds in length which make them ideal for distribution over social media platforms. Two out of three of the videos are targeted to healthy individuals which remains our greatest recruitment challenge. We submitted and received approval from our McMaster’s REB and have now disseminated these videos over social media and posted them on our website. We have also shared them with our partners (including CCC, CDHF and GI Society) and encouraged them to distribute with their audiences. Furthermore, we have produced French versions of the videos for use with our Montreal recruitment sites and these are currently under review by the local REB before dissemination.
(2) Video Interviews
The “Get To Know Us Interview Series” is intended to increase engagement with our current study participants so that they remain excited and motivated to stay enrolled. We created of six different interviews with key stakeholders, including three patients (Kim Daley, Kate Mason, and Megan Marsiglio) and three investigators (Drs. Paul Moayyedi, Charles Bernstein, and Michael Surette). These have been posted on our website but to increase their accessibility and longevity over social media, we have also broken down each video into short segments and added closed captioning.
These marketing assets were developed and implemented with the support of our patient partners. They will also contribute to the evaluation phase to determine the overall success of this initiative. To date, there have been more than 500 views for these videos over our website and Facebook posts. We are currently monitoring the impact of these videos on overall recruitment and retention rates and are hopeful that the online nature of these collateral materials will prove to more beneficial than traditional posters due to COVID restrictions.