Chantal Beaudry
Senior Partner
Lazar-FINN Partners, a FINN Partners Company
Giving Voice to the Unspoken
“Chantal Beaudry prompts colleagues and clients to see beyond today and imagine a tomorrow where people feel empowered to access the health system to have their needs met,” says Gil Bashe, Managing Partner, Global Health, FINN Partners. “Indeed, her mantra for inspiring creativity and risk-taking is: ‘Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.’”
Earning the nickname “GI Jane” for her award-winning work in shedding light on previously unmentionable diseases, Chantal has paved new ground by giving voice to medical conditions that have gone unspoken for too long. By empowering patients to share their stories and prompt a dialogue about options to treat conditions such as fecal and urinary incontinence, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and morning sickness, she has used her PR acumen to encourage the hidden to step forward.
For example, to help spread awareness about stress urinary incontinence, she created a unique “secret” reporter event and a comfortable “girl talk” atmosphere exhibit to foster acceptance and meaningful conversations around incontinence—prompting reporters to accept turning this taboo topic into front-page New York Times coverage. And instead of having pregnant women accept the norm of nausea, she worked to shine a light on potential treatments to address morning sickness by harnessing patient stories and their social media channels to mobilize women to find proven solutions. The campaign included a media and Twitter takeover by singer and actress Jana Kramer when she was expecting her second child, which resulted in 87+ million media impressions and 20 million reached on social media. Christina and David Arquette also shared their experience of dealing with her morning sickness during a media day with several outlets that ultimately reached 172 million people.
Since arriving at Lazar-FINN Partners, Chantal has also built a specialty offering that empowers patients to share their personal experiences in order to inspire hope through an integrated offering so that people with chronic health concerns can share experiences in one-on-one conversations, presentations to small groups, interactive webinars, patient-facing blogs, and stories in media. Chantal and her team now train more than 200 patients a year in storytelling.
