-
Provide enough context for the judges.
It’s important to remember that judges won’t be experts in every therapy area. Context is critical to help the judges assess campaigns objectively. For example, if your campaign’s target audience is patients with a rare disease, you would expect fewer views than a campaign targeting a disease with higher prevalence.
Talk about the impact the campaign has in the specific therapy area, for example, is it a pioneering campaign in the therapy area, providing resources where there were none before? Does the campaign demonstrate innovation by addressing gaps in current resources, delivering on clear unmet needs?
-
Be clear about the campaign’s objectives.
When compared with HCP campaigns, patient campaigns can be harder for the judges to apply an objective lens due the emotive nature of the campaigns. Being crystal clear on your campaign’s objectives makes it much easier for the judges to assess the success of your campaign by looking at how well it met or even surpassed those objectives.
-
Think carefully about the metrics you include.
Clicks, views and time spent are useful to demonstrate reach and how people engaged with your campaign, but they don’t show the impact very well. Prioritise metrics that show a change from baseline data as these are most valued by the judges. These kinds of metrics are great at illustrating the impact as they show the campaign’s effectiveness at making someone act and change their behaviour. This could be demonstrated by pre and post survey results as an example.
-
Make any testimonials you include really count.
When it comes to judging effectiveness, we all know data and metrics deliver the biggest clout in entries. However, testimonials can be another great way of showcasing how well the campaign has been received.
When including testimonials within your precious word count, select testimonials from the campaign’s end users, e.g. patients and HCPs, over client testimonials. Whilst it’s great to have a happy client (and we always recommend it!), it doesn’t prove the campaign was effective. Plus, if it’s being submitted for an award, then we’d already assume the client is pretty happy!
-
Use project challenges to your advantage.
As an industry trend, patient campaigns often see less investment and less innovation than HCP campaigns. The tide is turning and campaigns keep getting better and better every year, but it takes time. If you were able to deliver something fantastic on a shoestring, talk about how you made it happen.
In addition, patient campaigns can introduce complexity around additional project stakeholders, for example, integrating patients and/or advocacy groups into the design and review processes. Tell us if you did something great to optimise the process.
For all of you submitting entries to this year’s Digital Awards, we hope these tips are useful and we wish you the very best of luck! If you want to delve deeper into this topic, we recommend checking out our PM Talk with former judges discussing their experiences judging patient campaigns for the PM Society’s awards, with guest speakers Gillian O’Brien from GSK and Stuart Collins from Langland in conversation with hosts from the Patient Engagement Interest Group, Chris Wade and Shai Blackwell.