BackBone white paper conveys the value of Public Relations to Employee Assistance organizations seeking to differentiate their services and business model
BOCA RATON, FL — June 12, 2018 — BackBone, a public relations and marketing agency specializing in HR, health care and workforce technology, today announces that its new white paper, “How EAPs Can Use Public Relations to Communicate Value,” has been selected for inclusion in the Employee Assistance (EA) Digital Archive of University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) School of Social Work. The Employee Assistance Digital Archive is part of the school’s Health Sciences and Human Services Library (HS/HSL), and offers free access to original works, historical documents and other significant articles related to the EA field.
White Paper Abstract: Employee Assistance (EA) practitioners are continually required to communicate and prove their value — particularly in a business climate where every service provider needs to demonstrate ROI — not just this month or next, but at regular intervals. To business executives, value is defined by the correlation between EA services and productivity. To end-users, or employees using the EAP, it’s defined by the efficacy of the counseling and the speed with which the individual is able to mitigate or remove barriers to performance and personal well being. EAPs typically use several communications vehicles to convey value, from utilization reports geared to senior management to brochures, e-mails, and HR intranets targeted to end-users. However, few EAPs look toward standard public relations to communicate — indeed validate — their business model and the efficacy of the services they provide.
“BackBone’s white paper addresses an important and long overdue need for the Employee Assistance field, which is why we selected it for the EA archive,” said Dr. Patricia A. Herlihy, Founder of Rocky Mountain Research and co-curator of the EA Archive. “EA Professionals tend to focus mainly on clinical issues and frequently need assistance in communicating their value to their own organization as well as the outside world. This white paper offers a number of thoughtful, creative suggestions that any EA organization can implement.”
Dr. Herlihy and her colleague, UMB Associate Professor Dr. Jodi Jacobson Frey, founded the International Employee Assistance Digital Archive in 2013, realizing a need for a national depository of curated resources available for free to people in the field. The white paper and archive can be accessed at https://archive.hshsl.umaryland.edu/handle/10713/7817.
