PosterBuzz is a service of SCP, a communications and public relations firm in Wayne, PA. For 25 years, SCP has crafted dynamic campaigns, plans, tools, and materials that help nonprofits, foundations, academic institutions, and government agencies find compelling points of contact with their most important audiences, stakeholders, and communities. A socially responsible firm, SCP collaborates with its clients to develop breakthrough insights, strategies, and tactics that engage and inspire, connect and communicate, and ultimately make real change possible.
PosterBuzz is led by SCP President John Beilenson, who began attending scientific poster sessions at health care meetings as part of the firm’s consulting in the early 1990s. Often impressed by the cutting edge research he saw, Beilenson was underwhelmed by most posters’ design and their failure to use even basic communications principles. Based on these observations, he developed a series of guidelines and presentations to help aspiring scientific leaders create more effective posters. Over time, SCP and he realized that posters and poster sessions were a “gateway” experience, that by learning to create more dynamic posters, scientists learned communications and design skills that were broadly helpful to their presentations and teaching, career development, media outreach, even efforts to influence policy and change practice.
Today, Beilenson travels regularly to scientific meetings and academic departments to conduct workshops and poster walking tours (as well as to make presentations on messaging, PowerPoint presentations and social media in an academic context). “I like to say, ‘It’s not about the poster,” he notes. “It’s about learning skills you need to lead, to make a difference in your field.”
PosterBuzz Advisory Board
Several scientific and marketing experts have been critical to PosterBuzz’s development and continue to provide helpful insights that make our work more relevant. They include:
- Mark D’Esposito, MD, Professor of Neuroscience, University of California – Berkeley
- Linda Harootyan, MSW, Deputy Director, Gerontological Society of America
- Holly Holmes, MD, Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicince, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX
- Wanda Lovette, Marketing Consultant, Wayne, PA
- Colin Purrington, PhD, Former Associate Professor of Evolutionary Biology, founder of PimpMyPoster, Swarthmore, PA
