T2B Monthly | January 2025

To quote one of our community members, T2B is off to a roaring start this year, and yes, we really are taking things to the next level.

With T2B Pro launching right in the middle of JPM week, plus onboarding our new team member, our new website coming online, T2B becoming a registered trademark, our first Comm Convo of 2025 in the books, enrollment opening for the Peer-Learning Practicum, and the Culture Connect Roundtable going live, January has flown by.

All of that to say that, T2B is not here to be an echo chamber for our profession. Rather, as I said over on LinkedIn last week, “We are at a place in time and history when communicators in our industry must demonstrate that we're the ticket to unlocking healthcare's most important stories and advancing its most crucial missions.”

And that’s exactly what T2B is here to do.

So let me catch you up on exactly what we’ve been doing this month to support that quest.

It’s a meaty one! Today's email is 2,218 words, a 9.5-minute read.

In This Edition

📣 TODAY is Your Last Day to Join a Peer-Coaching Group

Your chance to enroll in the Peer-Learning Practicum (PLP) will close TODAY (and won’t open again until July).

Open exclusively for T2B Pro members, the PLP goes beyond traditional networking. We’ll place members into small peer-coaching cohorts of 5 - 7 people, enabling them to build real connections that we hope will last far beyond the program itself.

Secure your spot here

As Michele Baer (one of our cohort leads), says, “Your network is everything - it's where you build community, learn from your peers, and stretch your thinking.” The PLP is your opportunity to do this!

🎟️ It’s Time for the Next Fast Pass

It's time for another Fast Pass. The administration change here in the U.S. has presented challenges anew for all communicators, but especially for us in biopharma — with the pending RFK Jr. confirmation, HHS comms freeze, and DEI rollbacks.

Beyond "just" this, there have been abundant heartbreak and tragedy from coast to coast, from devastating fires to this week's shocking plane collision.

Last fall, we gathered our members for our first ad hoc open forum, or Fast Pass. Then, in particular, the need for community was immediately clear to us.

As the longest-ever January finally draws to a close, this is another moment in time calling for us to lean on each other.

Our next ad hoc, 30-minute open forum, FAST PASS: 47, will be on Tuesday, February 4th at noon ET.

It's important to us to maintain easy access to the community for all biopharma communicators. Therefore, this session will be FREE for all T2B members, regardless if you have a Pro membership. Ex-U.S. communicators are certainly invited, too!

Get the Zoom login info and cal invite by registering here.

We'll also share the Zoom link on T2B Slack at the start time of FAST PASS: 47 on Tuesday.

🚀 T2B Pro Launch

We’ve been so encouraged by the initial feedback we’ve received since T2B Pro launched two short weeks ago!

I cannot overstate how much time and effort the T2B team has put into curating the best possible membership package for you (a package to which we will add even more in the future).

Everything from inviting guest speakers for our events to choosing topics for our Comm Convos has been done based on my personal experiences as a biopharma communicator, feedback from the community, and guidance from our ad board. So, to see this response has been fantastic.

Let me address a couple of other related topics that I’ve been discussing with members:

1. To be clear, I thoroughly appreciate that the $1K Pro membership fee is not insignificant, especially if you have limited professional development funding or are a solo practitioner – and even more so if you’ve never joined a professional association before. But after a lot of research and conversations inside and out of this community, I feel that it's extremely competitively priced, even if you only take advantage of a portion of T2B’s programming. If anyone is on the fence re: going Pro, I’d be happy to provide more specifics on this if you email me ([email protected]).

2. Members want to know that their Pro membership dues are being put right back into the programming. For those who don’t know, managing T2B is my full-time job, and curating meaningful opportunities for connection and new events and resources is now Michelle Benz’s full-time job, too! (Michelle is our new head of professional development.) So, yes, I can confirm that any revenue brought in, whether that’s through membership fees or sponsorships, goes directly toward furthering T2B’s mission of cultivating conversations and connections across our global biopharma communicator community.

Thank you for your enthusiastic support for what we’re building and to make T2B sustainable! There’s so much more to look forward to this year.

🔥 Official T2B Swag For All Pro Members

As a thank-you for your support of the T2B community, all Pro members receive a welcome gift box in the mail featuring some seasonal T2B swag.

For the winter, we’ll be gifting you a beanie and some cozy socks!

🎉 T2B is Now a Registered Trademark

📸 Thank You / Recap of JPM

Despite the chaotic schedules (which didn’t allow for bathroom breaks) and the 18-hour days, there was always time for just one more meeting at JPM!

And this year’s event — the engagements, the networking, and the new connections built — reinforced that we're creating something extraordinary together at T2B. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what we got up to.

Big thanks to our T2Bmeet @ JPM host, FleishmanHillard, and our sponsors, AbbVie and HealthQuant, for making our reception possible!

💬 February Comm Convo: Defining Strategic

“Being strategic” is one of the most overused mandates in biopharma communications — but what does it actually mean?

This is the question we’ll explore in February’s Comm Convo with panelists Susan Hager (Operating Partner, Chief Marketing Officer, Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health) and Fiona Olivier (Chief Corporate Affairs & Investor Relations Officer, OSE Immunotherapeutics). We’ll dig into the core of being truly strategic in our profession, covering how to:

• Align communications with corporate goals.

• Become a forcing function for decision-making.

• Educate our organizations about the true scope and influence of the comms function.

Third speaker to be announced soon! Tickets for this — and all other Comm Convos — are included in the T2B Pro membership or can be bought for $40 if you’re a T2B Basic member. (Select events like our Comm Convos will be accessible to T2B Basic members via a la carte tickets.)

T2B Pro members: Log into your account, and get your promo code here.

💻 The New T2B Website Is LIVE

The brand-new T2B website went live this month!

This is the new and significantly improved hub for all things T2B, where you’ll find info about our community and planned events, industry insights, and of course, T2B Pro.

You all know how much importance I place on relationships and connections, and it’s been the same with this project.

I've known Chris Sullivan, the lead at TW (the firm managing my site), for over a decade. We met when TW won an RFP for a rebrand when I worked for the Commonwealth of MA.

I've brought him on to a number of projects since then, and he didn't hesitate when I approached him to work on the new T2B site.

Here we are in a fun, collaborative working session!

🗓️ Culture Connect Roundtable Applications Close on Monday, February 10th

Our roundtables are driven directly by members who bring deep knowledge and passion to key areas of biopharma communications. These groups create quarterly virtual programs and resources for the broader community.

And the first roundtable to launch in 2025 will tackle employee engagement.

Alongside Chair Meredith Kiernan (managing director, brand experience, Waterhouse Brands), this elite group of five T2B Pro members will leverage their passion and expertise in this area to bring new events and resources throughout the year to the broader community, enabling all of us to:

• More effectively partner with leaders and cross-functional colleagues to shape an engaged and committed workforce.

• Leverage our enthusiasm for supporting employees and cultivating great workplaces into opportunities for impactful conversations and shared insights.

• Play a leading role in shaping best practices across employee engagement and internal communications, fostering a culture of collaboration, motivation, and productivity.

If you’re a T2B Pro member, click here to apply for one of the sought-after spaces!

💸 Explore Life Science Mar-Comm Salaries

Without a standard career path in biopharma comms, job levels can feel inconsistent and "commensurate" pay seems like a black box.

Since 2023, we've collected 200+ salary ranges from publicly available mar-comm job descriptions across the industry — from small PR firms to big pharma and everything in between.

And now, we’re so pleased to be able to introduce you to the biopharma mar-comm salary transparency tool, salaries.bio, in partnership with Rvnway. We hope this tool will:

• Increase pay transparency across our profession

• Equip talent with data to support new job and promotion negotiations

• Educate emerging talent on what to expect for potential career progression

You're invited to anonymously add your salary as another way to advance your profession. (See details on the salaries.bio site about steps we're taking to protect anonymity, particularly for small comms teams and boutique PR firms.)

🔬The Joys of Demystifying Science

Hooriya (Hoori to her friends and colleagues) Hussain is the co-founder and chief client officer at Logic and Heart, and works with companies to help them uncover the unknown and decipher the difficult.

And she’s a big fan of scientists doing the same! She’s currently really enjoying the emergence of 'lab-side storytelling,' where researchers are using platforms like TikTok to document their daily work, failures included. Hoori says this work is going a long way toward demystifying the scientific process and showing science as a human endeavor.

“The authenticity is refreshing and it's creating new bridges between scientists and the public,” she says.

You can read more about Hoori’s work and what she’s learned in her career over on Slack in the January edition of T2B Pulse Narratives.

📰 January Biopharma Beats Bulletin

Say “hello” to Beth Snyder Bulik, founder and editor of Marketing & Pharma.

Beth launched the publication on her own in October 2024, as part of her quest to provide thoughtful analysis on pharma and healthcare marketing, media, and commercialization.

The twice-weekly newsletter focuses on marketing strategies, commercialization efforts, and creative ideas across the life sciences and healthcare (not restricted to pharma, despite that being the name of the publication).

Beth is particularly interested in topics where commercialization intersects with innovation, saying, “I’m willing to go afield. I want to cover R&D, but I want to focus on the commercialization side of it.” She also emphasizes the importance of biotech, noting that many companies are thinking about commercialization, patient targeting, and launch strategies even at an early stage.

And she’s all about attacking industry comms from a new perspective. “One thing I keep hearing from pharmaceutical companies, from agencies, from creatives, and others in the industry is that they need to think about big ideas,” she explains. “Companies are so worried about regulations and whether they can get things passed through medical, legal and regulatory. They’re worried about 'are they going to let us use TikTok or use certain words or images?' They're thinking about pharma first.

“So my idea for Marketing & Pharma was, let's flip the script and say, ‘Why not think about marketing and big ideas first, and then pharma?’”

📰 Read the full bulletin in T2B Slack.

(And remember: Starting with February's edition of the bulletin, these media updates will only be available to T2B Pro members.)

👀 Seen on Social

Scott White is on our ad board and came to JPM to support the T2B presence at the event.

And, like a lot of folks at JPM, he was fascinated by the many, many white Jaguar I Pace vehicles – known as ‘Waymos’ – in the area.

After originally being quite wary of them, he actually became a Waymo aficionado, even taking Michelle, Ilke (another ad board member), and me on our first trip.

There was so much discussion around these vehicles at the event. Did you love them? Were they too weird for you? Here are Scott’s thoughts: Join the conversation over on LinkedIn!

Happy weekend! ~Lynnea

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