Interview with Amy Sitnick, Greenphire
During today’s uncertain times, marketing and communications pros are being forced to operate through previously uncharted waters. To learn more about navigating this situation, we’ve interviewed communications experts across industries.
This interview is with Amy Sitnick, the Vice President, Marketing for Greenphire, a financial automation process company that works with life sciences research.
What has been your overarching approach to communication in this time of crisis?
Our overarching approach to the crisis has been three-fold: making sure that our employees are confident in their ability to carry on their work and that they feel personally supported; ensuring that clients know that we are “open for business” and that our clinical technology solutions are operational; and finally, that we are able to pivot and innovate our solutions based on the current environment. We call it #PhlexMode in true Greenphire fashion.
What do you think has been your most effective communication?
It’s hard to say what has been most effective because we’ve had different messages for different audiences. However, I think this blog post by our CEO (that was then picked up in industry publications) did a good job of distilling FDA and EU regulatory guidance, plus providing insights on things that Greenphire is doing to support the pharmaceutical industry.
For employees, our internal CEO emails have been very effective as well as our Instagram posts.
Finally, we’ve also found a lot of success in surveys right now. We did a survey to understand the pain points of clinical research sites, and we got 1,700 responses in 24 hours. They want to have a voice.
What do you think will be the biggest challenge for communicators in the coming weeks and months?
It’s hard to anticipate what’s coming next. For us, we want to help make sure that our clients feel supported and that their clinical research studies have all of the tools needed to ensure that patients have access to the potentially life-saving treatments they need, despite COVID-19.
What advice do you have for people in marketing communications for whom this is their first crisis situation?
Buckle up. This is going to be here for a while. Get rest and take care of yourself, because our roles right now are so incredibly essential. We are the glue of our organizations, and help position our companies as being empathetic, responsive, and essential partners to our clients — hopefully creating enduring loyalty down the road. If you aren’t having cross-functional, daily meetings with your peers, encourage that your organization comes together to identify challenges and work through ways to pivot and communicate.
