Project overview

Researchers at Washington State University used our digital expertise to recruit to the ZARRA trial. ZARRA is investigating how a new therapeutic may assist people looking to actively reduce their alcohol and smoking consumption. 

We spoke to Sterling M. McPherson, PHD, Professor & Assistant Dean for Research Department of Community and Behavioral Health Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine Washington State University to discuss how our recruitment service has been used on the ZARRA trial.

What were you trying to achieve?

We are trying to recruit people who want to reduce smoking and alcohol consumption. In the longer term we are trying to develop an integrated therapeutic treatment. This study is the opposite of a light-touch online study. It is very heavy therapeutically and placebased in two different sites in Washington State. We give incentives in exchange for evidence participants have met a goal (contingency management). For example, if participants provide a clean urine sample, they get a financial reward that escalates over time. We also use biochemical samples to check if they have been smoking.

How did the project work? 

At the moment, we are about a quarter of the way through. We’ve been recruiting for a year. The original plan was to have 5 years to recruit, but Covid delayed us so we are trying to compress the recruitment window. The recruitment game has changed post Covid. It used to be the case that we had a subcontract with a clinical team. Essentially we’d work with a recruiter who would pass potential participants on to us at Washington State. Younger people in my team persuaded me to give nativve a try. We no longer have the staff or the time to employ people either remotely or directly. Actually, I don’t know why people aren’t using this method for treatment as well as research. People with substance misuse disorders may not want to talk to a GP, so it could be really powerful for them to self-refer using an anonymous survey. Also, you get a more representative sample of the population for a study like this. If you think about it, people in the clinic have already sought out and/or received some kind of care. With nativve’s method we reach entirely new people. And for them, this can be a gateway into treatment too.

What do you like about nativve’s method? 

The main strength is that it is adaptable. nativve blast out ads. Interested people click on the ad. They go straight to an online survey, pre-screen themselves. And they are straight into our Redcap system. The funneling is amazing. Our goal is to schedule a visit within 24 hours of receiving the information. Location checks are also a really big deal for us. It means that people can’t game the system and we need to come into the clinic in person. Compared to other services we’ve used, nativve mold how they drive people to our system, rather than us going to a bank of participants owned by another company. We are already trying to manage loads of logins to various systems and another system is the last thing we need. The way nativve work with our systems is an enormous benefit. I also really like that we can ramp up and down the ad buy depending on our needs. I was thinking that recruiting four patients per month would be pretty good, but because of Covid we need to make up the time we’ve lost. Recently we ramped up our ad spend and within a month we’d recruited ten participants. I’ve never seen recruitment like this before. Yes you have to spend money on advertising, but even with a large ad budget, there is no comparison to the cost of a person sitting in a clinic. The return on investment is magnitudes greater. 

Would you like to learn how we can help with your recruitment? Get in touch with us to discuss.