Provides services and technical assistance for students so they benefit from research-based curricula taught in safe environments.

Produces and disseminates information to provide motivation and tools to enable individuals to make informed decisions about health issues.

Develops and implements education testing programs that benefit students, parents and public officals.

Works with the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government's primary source for collecting and analyzing data about public education.

Helps to provide all children with access to a quality education, and empowers people, organizations, and communities to bring about social change.

Is committed to helping clients improve the effectiveness of their workforce through a wide range of management, organizational, and business improvement efforts.

Produces, maintains and disseminates systematic reviews of the effects of social and behavioral interventions.

Barbara Diggs-Brown

Principal Communications Specialist

Barbara Diggs-Brown is director of social marketing communication at AIR. She has more than 25 years of communication experience, specializing in strategic planning, social marketing strategies, qualitative research, cultural competency, and media relations. She is a prominent national researcher on the development of effective social marketing and communication campaigns as tools to address social change issues, including education, race relations, economic development and health.

As senior social marketing counsel and strategist, Ms. Diggs-Brown carries out formative consumer research and product testing. She designs, conducts, and reports qualitative research for a number of AIR government and nonprofit clients.

Ms. Diggs-Brown frequently lectures and writes on race in the media and is coauthor of a critically acclaimed analysis of race relations in the United States, By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race published by Dutton. A professor emeritus at American University, she designed and conducted a qualitative research study under a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation that explored the issues surrounding race relations in the United States.

She is the founding director of the Institute for Strategic Communication for Nonprofits, an organization dedicated to improving the communication capacity of the nonprofit sector. She also is the author of the first style guide for public communication students and professionals, in its second edition with Wadsworth Publishing.

Her public affairs career has included serving as the director of public affairs, Urban Mass Transportation Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation; director of liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; and press secretary for a presidential campaign.