Visibility

Stand out to sponsors before they ever contact you.

If you’re not on the STARR Certified Sites list, you may not be in the room when sponsors are selecting sites. Certification signals that your team has the community relationships, staff training, and best practices in place to run successful trials. That’s not just visibility. It’s a head start on repeat business and longer-term sponsor relationships.

Community

Build the community relationships your site can’t buy.

STARR does something no site can easily do on its own: we proactively identify advocacy organizations and community groups within 30 miles of your site, make warm introductions on your behalf, and track those relationships over time. The result is a site that’s genuinely embedded in the community. That’s not goodwill. That’s infrastructure.

Staff Training

Give your staff the training that changes how patients feel walking out the door.

Certified sites gain access to STARR’s mental health literacy tools including the Auditory Hallucination Simulation, the STARR 988 crisis script, and our Trauma-Informed Care training. When your team has a deeper understanding of what patients experience and how to care for them, everything gets better: the conversations, the retention, the outcomes.

Network

Join the network sponsors and CROs are already paying attention to.

STARR Certified Sites are part of a growing, connected community of sites, CROs, and pharma partners advancing mental health clinical research together. Resources, best practices, and peer support flow through active workgroups and regular interactive webinars. The stronger the network, the stronger every site in it.

Reputation

In a crowded field, reputation is a business advantage.

At a moment when sponsors have more site options than ever, certification is a credentialing signal that cuts through, not just to pharma and CROs, but to patients, caregivers, and the community organizations you partner with. It tells every stakeholder that your site has made a deliberate investment in responsible, community-connected research. That reputation compounds over time.

Growth

A certification that grows with the field.

As new priorities emerge in mental health clinical research, STARR works with certified sites to identify them, develop best practices, and integrate them into the certification, so your site is always operating at the leading edge, not playing catch-up.

Under an hour

Empathy and Stigma Reduction Training

When your staff truly understands what patients with serious mental illness experience, every interaction improves. We moderate our Auditory Hallucination Simulation session (30 minutes), giving patient-facing staff a firsthand perspective on what your participants live with every day. The shift in how your team shows up is immediate.

40 hours per year

Community and Advocacy Outreach

Sites that are embedded in their communities recruit faster, retain longer, and earn the kind of trust that sponsors notice. Chances are, you’re already doing this work. NAMI Walks, health fairs, and community presentations all count. Forty hours over the course of a year is less than one hour per week, and most certified sites tell us they’re already there.

11 minutes per staff member

STARR 988 Crisis Response Training

When a caller doesn’t meet study criteria due to suicidal ideation, what happens next matters. STARR 988 gives your screening staff a simple, structured script to pivot that conversation and connect the individual to the 988 Suicide and Mental Health Crisis Lifeline rather than simply ending the call. The training takes 11 minutes. The impact on that caller could be far greater. This is one certification element no site can afford to skip.

Know your community

Community Assessment

You can’t build community relationships you don’t know exist. This assessment maps the mental health resources within your site’s reach including advocacy organizations, community mental health centers, faith-based programs, and other groups serving the same population you are. If you already have this information, great. If you don’t, STARR will help you build the map and then help you use it.

A credential sponsors and patients can see.

The STARR Certified badge signals, visibly on your website and materials, that your site meets a higher standard of community and advocacy engagement. It’s not just a logo. It’s a shortcut for sponsors, patients, and partners who are evaluating who they want to work with.

A listing that puts you in the room before the conversation starts.

Pharma companies and CROs actively use the STARR Certified Sites page to identify and vet sites for new studies. Your listing puts you in front of the decision-makers who are selecting sites right now, before they ever reach out.

Visibility that extends beyond the listing.

Certified sites are regularly featured in STARR newsletters, keeping your site’s work visible to a national audience of sponsors, CROs, and advocacy partners. That ongoing presence builds a documented, searchable record of your site’s community impact, one that decision-makers will find when they look you up.

Training and tools your team can use immediately.

Certified sites get access to the Auditory Hallucination Simulation, STARR 988 crisis response training, workgroup participation, and a growing library of community engagement resources, practical tools designed to strengthen participant interactions, improve retention, and support your staff on the front lines of mental health research.

Community connections you don’t have to build yourself.

STARR proactively identifies advocacy organizations and community groups within 30 miles of your site, makes warm introductions on your behalf, and tracks those relationships over time. You get an established network without starting from zero.

A peer network that makes your site stronger.

STARR Certified Sites share resources, best practices, and peer support through active workgroups and insider sessions, webinars focused on the critical topics shaping mental health research right now. Sponsors, CROs, advocacy groups, and fellow certified sites are all in the room. It’s a collaborative infrastructure built around shared goals, not just shared membership.

Ready to get started?

The first step is the Site Certification Pre-Assessment. It takes just a few minutes and helps us understand where your site is and how STARR can best support you.

Still have questions? Visit our FAQ page or reach out directly.

Questions? Contact us.

The STARR Coalition