Once in a while, a comms initiative comes along that just hits all the right notes.
by Ben Capper
As a consultant, project lead, comms manager, or whatever your role is, occasionally you experience a project that has all those things you wish for:
- It’s a genuinely exciting, game-changing issue
- It’s well led by people who take strong, well-informed decisions
- They’re highly invested in what you’re doing, but entirely trust your expertise and judgement to get on with the job.
- The timelines and budgets are realistic.
- You get fantastic creative partners to work with.
And, unsurprisingly perhaps, it exceeds all expectations, smashes its campaign objectives and wins two industry awards.
I experienced one such initiative recently: The MyCareView project in Cheshire East.
OK, so a bit of background:
Many NHS organisations are introducing electronic patient records (or ‘EPRs’). They’re essentially all your medical records, but digitised. It’s why the next time you’re in hospital, you’ll see consultants and nurses on iPads, rather than pushing trolleys full of paper around.
Some organisations link theirs up with local partners. So your hospital, and your GP surgeries, and maybe even your Adult Social Care team at the council might be using the same system; meaning that everyone has the same, up-to-date information about you in the same place.
Some have a patient interface which means that the user can see their medical history themselves, possibly book an appointment, communicate with their clinical teams, you name it…
This is essentially what MyCareView is. It’s a partnership between Cheshire East Council, the (now former) NHS Cheshire CCG, and the two big acute hospital trusts in the area.
Last year, the system was integrated with the NHS App, which meant that everyone in the Cheshire East area would have both everything that the App provides plus everything to do with their history with the local hospitals too. This made Cheshire East one of only a handful of regions in the UK to offer this.
In summer 2021, I led a big public awareness campaign on behalf of the partnership with the aim of getting app downloads of the NHS App, and sign-ups to the local MyCareView system.
The campaign involved:
- Creating the brand ID itself (including a campaign ID featuring local people)
- Outdoor media
- Social and Digital audio advertising
- Local PR
- Door-to-door delivery of a printed booklet
- Print in community locations
It ran intensively between July and early September 2021.
It now has over 50,000 active users, and has won two industry awards.
It was an almost utopian comms project; with a set of circumstances that you won’t find often. But nevertheless, I think there are some things to learn about this that I will take forward into other future projects.
Here they are:
1. Take your time
I first started work on this project in December 2018. The public-facing campaign didn’t get under way until July 2021.
In that time I was doing a lot of community engagement work. I ran a ton of public facing workshops and focus groups to understand how best to tailor what was essentially an off-the-shelf EPR system to the local population.
I also helped coordinate some very targeted comms to users of the system in some specific clinical areas where it was been rolled out in a limited way.
This in itself took time. But it was worth it.
This process gave us really important insight into what would fly locally, and what wouldn’t. It showed us what people really valued, and were excited about, what they were worried about, and what they thought should be standard practice.
And this did, as it always should, genuinely shape, not only the comms, but also the solution itself.
By the time we did go public with the campaign;
- We knew it worked
- We knew the solution was based on what people told us was important
- We knew we had buy-in from important local partners
- We knew we had the right creative partners lined up to help us deliver it.
This took time. But we stook to our guns. And it paid off in the end.
2. Respect your audience
I’m really proud that this project genuinely did take what the public told us and shaped both the solution itself and the comms.
They told us that they were perfectly happy to use digital solutions to manage their health and wellbeing, as long as whatever we were asking them to use was:
- Secure
- Convenient
- Easy to use
So we literally based our messaging around these points, and went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that the solution did all these things.
Whilst adapting your campaign messaging to what your audience is telling you is the smart thing to do; it’s also the right thing to do. It’s about respecting them and where they’re at, answering their concerns, and building a solution that improves their lives on their own terms.
3. Manage your expectations
We talk a lot in comms about “managing expectations”.
It’s a pretty negative phrase, that I don’t like using. It’s very often used in relation to your audiences; and more often than not, I feel it’s a bit unfair.
In my experience, people generally don’t expect the world from a new initiative or product. They just expect it to work and to make their lives easier. And if you respect them, you should go the extra mile to shape your comms around their needs, and demonstrate how it will do this for them.
I prefer to call this “being honest”.
I’ve spoken to many people about many EPR projects over the past few years. Very often these projects are in the very early stages of development. And while there is understandable excitement and passion for them among the development team for the possibilities, it’s usually internal expectations of what their patients or public will be interested in, or excited about, that need the most careful management.
EPRs (especially patient facing ones) can take literally years to implement from the initial concept. Once they’re ready, and work, and are available to use and benefit from; people (be they professionals or public) will be ready to hear about them, use them, and even advocate for them.
But years out, without it even being even procured, let alone implemented; they’re sadly unlikely to pay too much attention to it, given everything else going on in the world right now.
To their absolute credit, the MyCareView project team understood this point perfectly well. They listened to what the public was saying, and quietly did the hard yards of stakeholder engagement, and perfecting the solution through limited releases in specific clinical areas, before handing it over to me to light the creative fireworks (in partnership with the extraordinarily brilliant creative team at Cheshire West and Cheshire Council) and telling the whole local population about it.
This was 100% a smart solution, and the results speak for themselves.
If you’re in a similar situation with a similar project, you may find that the expectation management may be more internally facing than external.
4. Focus on the benefits
When it comes to implementing complex new technology, it pays to be all over the detail.
Understanding interoperability, data protocols, and device integration is pretty much essential to making such a thing happen in the real world. It takes expertise and is hard, time-consuming work to get right.
But as I’ve just described, your audience is unlikely to pay too much attention to all this.
My experience on this project, through speaking extensively to the public and designing comms around their aspirations, shows how essential it is to focus on the benefits to them.
By demonstrating how convenient the solution was for them; by showing how it provides the user with control over their data, by engendering confidence in it, we created a powerful story that resonated with people.
Yes, of course, we talked about how to find the app, and how to install it, and how to register. This was all important detail.
But it was secondary to talking about the benefits, and how it would improve people’s daily, and working lives
Whatever you’re talking about, our role as communicators is to respect our colleagues’ expertise and knowledge; and to translate their solutions into the language of benefits and outcomes. If we can do that, we have a great chance of being successful in whatever we’re doing.
5. Iron out the glitches
One of the most important things that the public told us was that, whilst they were open to using a new digital system if it genuinely was more convenient for them and provided them with greater security over their data; it absolutely had to work.
And work first time. And every time.
They had zero patience for a “Beta” version or a solution that promised a lot but didn’t deliver. They wanted it to work exactly like their banking apps do. If it didn’t do that, or was glitchy in any way, they’d abandon it (like most people would).
This was another reason why the project team did 100% the right thing by taking their time to get the solution right before going big on the comms.
6. Be lucky!
OK so it is true that there were some circumstances beyond our control, that definitely helped.
The integration with the NHS App was long in the development, and long considered a potential game changer for the solution; and regardless of circumstances was always likely to be the catalyst for a public launch during summer 2021.
In summer 2021 however; circumstances definitely lined up nicely for us.
The NHS App became the single app you needed to demonstrate your COVID vaccination status, which at the time, was essential if you wanted to go anywhere out of the UK on holiday. (At the time of writing it’s still essential for many, mostly non-European countries).
After over a year cooped up at home through the first (several) waves of the pandemic, people were understandably keen to take a holiday. In order to do this, they needed the NHS App installed.
Given that the main call to action for our campaign was also to download the NHS App, this set of circumstances undeniably helped us!
But that said, nothing is certain in comms as in life. We still needed to get the timing right. I worked closely with colleagues at NHS Digital to line up our messaging and our schedules to make sure they aligned.
Once we did this, we knew we had a good chance of success. And so it proved.
7. Go big or go home* (*once you’ve done the other things)
This was one of those very rare comms initiatives, where the answer to the question, “who is the target audience?” is actually “everyone”!
Well OK, not quite everyone, but certainly “everyone” in Cheshire East. And with a population of over 350,000, that’s as close to “everyone” as you’re likely to get in this game.
It was genuinely a solution that could benefit literally anyone in the area; young and old, active and infrequent service users. So with that in mind, we decided to go all out…
The only problem with going all-out, is that (here’s that “expectations management” thing again), sometimes ambitions and resources don’t match up.
What was great about working with this team was that, whilst there was never any sense of providing a blank cheque to the campaign, they were realistic about what it would take to run a public campaign of such magnitude. They allowed me to propose a course of action, gave me a realistic budget, and tasked me with pricing it up using approved suppliers.
We kicked it around between ourselves and came to an agreement on what would be done, and how it would be funded and resourced.
They then let me get on with it, and were always on hand to comment and sign materials off, so that everything was produced and delivered on time.
It resulted in a campaign that comprised a wide range of print and digital advertising, outdoor media, door-to-door distribution, community advertising, and local PR. We used as many free channels as we possibly could too.
But the result was that you couldn’t move in Cheshire East during July and August 2021 without seeing something about the MyCareView programme.
If “vanity metrics” are your thing, this resulted in total digital impressions of over 270,000 over this period. Which is nice.
But far more importantly it resulted in 11,500 new registrations and 17,500 active users over the campaign period.
This has since grown to over 50,000 as the materials we produced have continued to be used and seen across the area.
8. Work with great people
I was really proud to work on this project. It has been a definite career highlight. It was challenging at times, but a lot of fun, and I’m so proud to have been part of delivering something with such an important legacy for the health and wellbeing of a big population.
And what made it even better was that it was such a great team effort. The project team, comprising people from Cheshire East Council and NHS Cheshire CCG; the comms teams from both organisations, third sector colleagues, the software provider (Patients Know Best) a brilliant local photographer, the brilliant creative team at Cheshire West and Cheshire, were all fantastic people to work with, and real experts in their fields.
They were great to work with and helped deliver a wildly successful campaign.
I hope there are lessons here for everyone working in comms. Great projects do happen, and when they do, great things happen too.
Ben Capper owns Grey Fox Communications and Marketing. You can say hello on Twitter at @BenCapper
*Sign up for the comms2point0 eMag*
The comms2point0 eMag features exclusive new content, free give-aways, special offers, first dibs on new events and much, much more.
Sound good? Join over 3k other comms people who have subscribed. You can sign up to it right here
