McKeever joins Page Center as senior research fellow

August 26, 2022 • Jonathan McVerry

Brooke Weberling McKeever joined the Arthur W. Page Center as its most recent senior research fellow. McKeever is a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. She has been a Center scholar since 2014. As a senior research fellow, she is leading one of two calls for research proposals this year as part of the Center’s Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant program.

The topic of McKeever’s call is prosocial communication. Studies in this call will examine all types of organizations that engage in advocacy, activism or forms of communication aimed at improving public health or social conditions. Results will reveal strategies for these organizations to communicate their prosocial initiatives and promote positive social change effectively and ethically.

“Donating, volunteering, advocating are all prosocial behaviors,” McKeever said. “But there are some tricky ethical questions that come up on how to use emotion and persuasion and images to communicate these initiatives.”

She added that, “the hearts of people in most of these organizations are in the right places, but they don’t always achieve their mission. We can use more research in this area, and that’s how this topic came about.”

“There are some tricky ethical questions that come up on how to use emotion and persuasion and images to communicate these initiatives.”

McKeever’s research focuses on the work of nonprofit public relations and health communication. She pays particular attention to misinformation and its effects on public health. McKeever’s interest in nonprofit work began at her first job after college at a public relations agency in Chicago.

“I always tell my students, we worked with a lot of great corporate clients, a lot of restaurants, hotels, and lifestyle clients, and it was a lot of fun,” she said. “I learned a lot, but I realized that my favorite part of that job was when the corporate clients would ask us to pair them with a nonprofit organization… like for a CSR initiative or a fundraising event.”

For her next job, McKeever sought out a nonprofit and was hired as an event marketing representative at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. After receiving her master’s degree from Ohio University, St. Jude hired McKeever back to open an office in Pittsburgh. That’s when she learned about health communication, a final piece that would boost her research interests and send her back to academia.

“I realized that I've been doing health communication all along,” she said. “As part of my public relations and fundraising work, we were communicating about cancer survival rates and treatments that St. Jude had developed. So that's how my research interests developed.”

McKeever earned her Ph.D. and a certificate in interdisciplinary health communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Since joining the faculty of the University of South Carolina in 2011, she has been published in numerous academic journals and received many awards for her work. In 2018, the Page Center funded a McKeever-led project as part of its advocacy communications call. She was first funded by the Center in 2015 for a project that examined collaborations between corporate social responsibility programs and nonprofit partners.

McKeever’s research call on prosocial communication was announced on Aug. 2 at the AEJMC Conference in Detroit. Visit the call page for more information. Proposals are due Jan. 15, 2023. The Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar grant program is the Page Center’s primary function. Since its 2004 founding, the Center has funded nearly 300 scholars and awarded more than $1 million in research funding making it an international leader in research on ethics and integrity in public communication. Click here to learn about other members of the Page Center, including the Page Center senior research fellows.