San Francisco’s Tobacco Free Project (TFP) is part of a statewide campaign to reduce tobacco use with a special focus on those most impacted by tobacco marketing and use. TFP needed to facilitate a community engagement process — dubbed “customer experience” — that would inform their 2022-2025 work to reduce tobacco-related health disparities in San Francisco. The customer experience process brought together a wide range of stakeholders to discuss and prioritize local tobacco control issues, including public health professionals, academics, leaders from community-based organizations, and community members.
Over the course of six months, Facente Consulting collaborated with TFP, co-chairs of the San Francisco Tobacco Free Coalition, and Bright Research Group to plan and implement four virtual community engagement sessions centered around key areas of tobacco control. Facente Consulting facilitated all virtual sessions, with our key roles including guiding discussion around key topics, and designing an interactive prioritization process to help stakeholders communicate the issues they found most important. Priority tobacco control areas that emerged from the customer experience process included youth engagement, smoke-free multi-unit housing policies, cessation support services, and policies setting minimum retail prices, package sizes, and volume sizes for tobacco products. These findings helped TFP gain valuable insights into how to structure their future tobacco control work to promote health equity.