What we do

First, we listen to understand your needs. Then, we partner with you to set achievable intervention goals based on your community or organization’s contextual factors, capacity, and readiness — and based on best and promising practices. Our team of expert project managers collaborates with you to strategize, discuss progress, and celebrate wins. Through our dedicated consulting, we improve collaboration between agencies, convene thought leaders across the nation to share ideas, and empower everyone involved to have their voices heard.

Our consulting services include:

• Agenda setting and strategic planning, during which we facilitate goal setting, highlight project successes and findings, and provide recommendations for next steps.
• Equity and disparities consulting, which means we advise on what policies and initiatives would yield the most equitable, fair, and just outcomes for your community.
• Data collection planning and management, including assistance with store assessments, compliance checks, AVC inspections, merchant education, survey form development, retailer sampling, and more.
• Cross-agency collaboration allows us to promote synergy across public health efforts within a state, and we also convene public health partners across states doing similar work.
• Program implementation support, meaning we help you achieve goals that align with national standards and guidelines (such as those from the CDC’s National and State Tobacco Control Program and Synar Program).
• Enforcement process improvement, i.e. we help improve your workflow, create efficiencies, and conduct compliance checks by integrating visit data from state and local agencies.
• Custom survey form development catered to your state; we create a form that meets the needs of your community for assessment, enforcement, or education efforts.
• Retailer sampling, which means we’ll provide a list of “sample” retailers to use for data collection after first working with you to determine appropriate sampling strategies.

We provide you with the data visualization and storytelling tools you need to educate decision makers and empower community members. We’ll help you tell the story of your community’s retail environment in a way that informs policy change and leads to community action.

Data visualizations and storytelling materials can take the form of:

• Infographics that share key information in a digestible, compelling way.
• Mapping / geographic information systems (GIS) that help visualize patterns in retailer location, density, and proximity to youth-oriented locations (i.e. schools and parks).
• Interactive data dashboards in Tableau and in-depth reports on your local point-of-sale landscape, which can include potential for impact, policy context, community readiness, and more.
• Additional supplemental materials like presentations, handouts, and digital marketing content (social media posts, press releases, factsheets, etc.)

We offer both in-person and web-based training designed to engage and inform. Our training sessions employ best practices for adult learning and youth engagement, and they are developed with the overarching goal to build community and create positive change. Each training event we lead is planned, coordinated, and facilitated in close collaboration with our local partners.

Our training sessions are focused on:

• Place-based public health and point-of-sale concepts, such as why the retail environment matters and the purpose of telling a story with data.
• How to collect high-quality data through store assessments — and how to energize your team for data collection.
• Discussing best practices, emerging evidence, challenges, and successes — and convening partners to facilitate and bring expertise to these discussions — at conferences or community meetings, as well as in small-group settings like virtual workgroups and partner check-in calls.
• Youth advocacy, which is geared toward empowering our youth to be social justice advocates and giving them the tools they need to be leaders in their communities.

We build and maintain proprietary technology to assist you with data collection and management, visualization, mapping, and reporting. Depending on your goals, we can provide tools that are already built and in use, or we can create custom features that are designed specifically for you.

Our tools and tech services include:

• The Point-of-Sale Toolkit (POST©), a user-friendly, web-based platform that provides everything you need for successful data collection, data management, visualization, and analysis.
• Store Mapper©, an online data visualization tool that maps out point-of-sale data on specific types of retailers, such as tobacco or alcohol retail outlets.
• Custom software development for your needs; we work with strong software development teams to ensure our tools work for you.
• Data cleaning of retailer lists, as well as assessment, enforcement, and compliance data; cleaning is an integral part of data analysis, reporting, and data visualization, as it ensures your data is comprehensive and accurate.
• Data analysis, including interactive data dashboards and infographics, provided based on identified research questions and goals; we work collaboratively with you to determine data points, eligibility criteria, geographic parameters, and more.