About the Team

Partner

Kirsten Thistle

Kirsten specializes in health and science communication, advocacy and stakeholder engagement.   

Kirsten co-directed Heath is Primary, a five-year national public awareness campaign sponsored by Family Medicine for America's Health. Health Impact Strategies led the strategic design of the campaign and was responsible for all aspects of its execution, including messaging, advertising, event management, digital engagement, media relations and stakeholder engagement.  

Kirsten was previously senior vice president and head of the US Health Care practice at APCO Worldwide, a global public affairs agency.  

Kirsten has significant experience in the vaccine space.  For almost twenty years, she has focused on educating policymakers, the media and the public on the safety of vaccines and the value of immunizations across the lifespan.  Kirsten serves on the board of directors for Every Child by Two (ECBT), a national vaccine advocacy group founded by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and Betty Bumpers. Kirsten is the principal architect of the ECBT Vaccinate Your Baby campaign, which launched in 2008 and has become among the most visible and effective vehicles for communicating trustworthy, evidence-based information to the public about the importance of on-time immunizations for infants and children.  

In addition to her work with ECBT, Kirsten built and ran a coalition of vaccine manufacturers focused on addressing vaccine hesitancy and correcting misinformation about vaccines, including questions about links between vaccines (MMR and later thimerosal) and autism, SIDS, multiple sclerosis and the safety of adjuvants, among others.   Kirsten has also worked to raise awareness of teen immunizations, including those that prevent meningitis and HPV, and created an adult immunization communications platform for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.  Kirsten has participated in and presented at the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit. She has worked in close collaboration with vaccine advocates and opinion leaders including the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Vaccine Education Center, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Voices for Vaccines, Sabin Vaccine Institute, PKIDS, the National Meningitis Association, the Autism Science Foundation and many others. 

Kirsten has a BA in Political Science and Business from Mount Saint Mary’s University.  She served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and has taught graduate level courses in communications and issues management.

Partner

Ann Saybolt

Ann specializes in consumer branding, public education and social marketing/behavior change.  For the past 20 years, her work has focused exclusively on communications campaigns designed to influence health behaviors and policy and provide funding for global health programs. 

Ann co-directed Heath is Primary, a five-year, national public awareness campaign sponsored by Family Medicine for America's Health. Health Impact Strategies led the strategic design of the campaign and was responsible for all aspects of its execution, including messaging, advertising, event management, digital engagement, media relations and stakeholder engagement. 

Ann was previously senior vice president and led the social impact portfolio at APCO Worldwide, where she led the development and launch of Shot@Life, a fundraising and advocacy campaign to drive awareness and support for U.S. government funding of global childhood vaccines.  Ann’s team worked with the United Nations Foundation to build and launch the campaign, including development of the strategic approach, brand and creative development, grassroots and constituency-building efforts, corporate and non-profit partnership development, and advertising and earned media.  In addition, she served as the lead project manager at APCO for Rotary International’s polio advocacy efforts, and led a five-country team engaged in local advocacy to drive donor government funding of the Polio End Game. 

Prior to joining APCO, Ann led the Social Impact practice at Fleishman-Hillard.  In this role, she led public communications for the government’s largest social marketing effort, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign.  Her team’s work for ONDCP demonstrated measurable changes in attitudes among key stakeholder audiences and won the agency two Silver Anvil awards.  Ann also led the development of a binge drinking prevention campaign for the DoD/Tricare during her tenure at FH.  The campaign, That Guy, demonstrated measurable results in attitudes and behaviors on installations where the campaign was implemented.  Both of these multi-year efforts leveraged various communications interventions to drive awareness and change behaviors among target audiences.

During the nation’s transition to digital television, she developed and coordinated strategic communications for the consumer technology industry on emerging digital TV and video technologies. She built retailer and consumer education campaigns to raise awareness and increase adoption of the new technologies.

Ann’s broad skills in communications include work in public affairs, crisis management, media relations, paid advertising, partnerships and coalition-building. She began her career on Capitol Hill and graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in political science, where she studied political polling and research at Eagleton Institute of Politics.