FAQ

The super-abridged version: The New Normal™ (TNN) movement gives you access to millions of dollars in resources and support at no cost to you.

The slightly longer version:  TNN is making health research easily accessible to everyone at a huge scale for the first time in history, with tons of different organizations and people (like you!) coming together.

If you’re like most researchers, you’re tired of delays or cancellations to your studies due to lack of participants.  TNN saves you time and money by helping you recruit faster and better.  Our tool will help you hang on to that grant money and finish the cool research you set out to do, so you can focus on what you do best: making breakthroughs and improving lives.

We’re plugged in with the NIH (thanks again for funding us!), local and national nonprofits, and other organizations to help share your breakthroughs and make the world a better place.  The star of the show (besides the humans involved) is the multimillion-dollar matchmaking portal (we lovingly call it TNN Match) that works its magic to connect people (whom we affectionately call VIPs-Very Important Participants) to information about your health research studies faster than ever before.  It’s mobile, easy and dare we say: fun.

Say peace out to the days of paper flyers in coffee shops and hallways and say hello to a mobile platform to pre-match for your studies.  TNN can also help spread the news on findings from your studies so that people and organizations can use it to live healthier, longer lives.

Consider the TNN Match your:

• Personal website to promote your study to the public at no cost. Plus, it’s mobile-friendly!
• An easy way to connect with a pool of people who are already interested in participating in health research.
• Your simple platform for mass communications. No more laboring over manual emails to hundreds of people.

You have access to built-in resources like email templates that are easily customizable and keep everything running smoothly – and fast.

What’s not to love?

Grand total: ~45 minutes (about as long as an episode of your favorite show on Netflix). Not bad for saving you a ton of time and money and sweat while making the world a healthier place, right? 

 Click here to get started! 

Now let’s break down what it takes and how much time of YOUR time (repeated) to get your study plugged in to TNN Match. 

a. 20 minutes: Jot out a short description of your study (there are character limits!) in approachable language at a 7th grade reading level. We (plus researchers, communication teams, IRB leaders, and the public!) made a guide you can use to help you make sure your draft lines up with those requirements. This writing style will feel new. That’s OK, it means you’re doing it right! Once you’re done, submit that puppy.

b. 0 minutes: The TNN Portal Review Committee checks out your study description to make sure it meets the style and approachability requirements. Within 2 weeks you’ll hear if it’s approved or if you need to tweak it a bit before approval.

c. 15 minutes: Once the Portal Review Committee approves your study description, submit a short IRB amendment with portal copy—if your site requires IRB approval. If your site doesn’t require IRB approval, your study will go live once approved by the Portal Review Committee. Bingo bango!

d. 0 minutes: IRB Amendment Review

e. 1 minute: You’ll email the Portal Review Committee your IRB amendment approval.

f. 0 minutes: Your study is LIVE and published and you can helicopter your lab coats over your heads in celebration (if that’s your thing).

TOTAL INVESTMENT OF YOUR TIME: ABOUT 45 MINUTES.

TOTAL INVESTMENT OF YOUR DOLLARS: 0!

They absolutely do! Everyone from research to administrative to communications leaders has been involved. It’s those very leaders (along with members of the public) who helped create the style guide for the study descriptions. Go team!

All the (great, easy, world-change-y) things:

• 1.  Use the portal to easily engage with your potential VIPs. TNN Match (and the built-in templates we created for you) makes it easy to mass-email thousands of people with just a few clicks.
  2. Respond to participants who want to team up with your study. The cool part is that even if this participant isn’t a match for your current study, they could be what you need for a future one. Now your team is ‘huddled’ in one place to easily reach out when you want to talk next!
  3. You can set up alerts to let you know when people express interest. Just make sure to reply within at least 5 business days, if not sooner, because no one likes being ghosted! Using those email templates makes it a cinch (but you can feel free to make a custom email too!).
  4. **SUPER IMPORTANT NOTE: When people don’t match, please send them a message (there’s a template for it!) so they understand why and can find another study. No one likes to be ignored, especially when they really, really want to help! We made it super easy for you – it takes just a few clicks and less than 10 seconds to send the template message to thousands.
  5. Remove your study once you’re done recruiting your dream team. Let’s be honest, you could recruit thousands of interested VIPs in a few weeks and be done. Once you do this, you won’t receive or have to deal with more requests from the public

Not to brag, but we’ve basically thought of everything.

And if we missed something or can improve, drop us a line at idea@bethenewnormal.org! Facebook wasn’t built in a day, and neither were we – we’ll evolve and optimize together!

Nope! All of your information is saved and accessible! What a nice feature, right?

Nope. This tool is NOT for you if you’re not into faster study times or responding to the droves of people who want to get involved and help your research help humanity. (See what we did there? Wink.)

No biggie. This is your easiest way to get them in the front door for that, so to speak. Thanks to the customizable tool filters and questions in TNN Match, you can focus that phase with VIPs you’ve already identified as having the best chance of matching. So you still save time!

What you’d do in this case is:

• List your basic criteria to narrow down your VIP team pool—such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, smoker/non-smoker, diagnosed with cancer/diabetes, etc. This will auto-filter out those who express interest and move those folks who pre-qualify on to the next round.
• For complicated criteria, such as having a recent blood test result in a certain range, save that for after you have your first round VIP picks and can run those tests.
• You wouldn’t know that info over the phone at a call center anyway, so this just saves you time and resources to get to that step faster.

No worries, we’re here for you! Click here for our contact page and you can let your questions run wild. Oh, and if you happen to have a great research or health breakthrough that you want to share with the world, you could be on our podcast! Just ping us at idea@bethenewnormal.org.