My tenure at an early stage healthcare start-up was when I first saw a wildly successful insights campaign. The campaign is a testament to the immense power that compelling stories can hold, and how quality research can not only inform marketing campaigns, but be part of them too.
The company was developing a healthcare-oriented messaging app for frontline healthcare professionals – e.g. nurses. We knew, anecdotally, that the pager devices we wanted the app to replace were a huge resource drain, and frequently frustrated frontline staff. We also hypothesised that staff were already likely to be using freely available consumer apps to communicate more efficiently, posing a significant security risk.
The only problem? While we suspected an opportunity existed, we couldn’t quantify it. Neither could we explain the behaviours that were driving it. To do so, we needed a research plan.
Developing a multi-source research plan
Step 1: Desk research
Reaching out to every hospital in the country to find out how many pager devices were in use, as well as our supply side partners to start piecing together the financial cost of existing communication channels.
Step 2: A representative survey of frontline healthcare professionals
This assessed their attitudes and behaviours around existing communication channels available in their workplace.
Step 3: Qualitative interviews
Interviews with senior members of hospital staff from both clinical and IT backgrounds. These completed our view of the market. This audience had contrasting opinions vs. frontline professionals.
All three sets of data were analysed together. This enabled us to build connections between data points and build a narrative. And what a fascinating story it was. We were so shocked by the data – it became crucial to our marketing strategy, not just product development.
Data driven marketing campaigns
We estimated that approximately 130,000 pagers were in use within the UK healthcare system (accounting for over 10% of all devices in the world), costing £6.6million. Worse, we found 43% of emergency response time is wasted because of inefficient communication channels.
And now a few of the scarier numbers:
- One in three healthcare staff are using unsecured, unapproved channels to communicate
- One in five are aware of colleagues knowingly breaching security policies
- One in forty have been disciplined for using consumer messaging apps to transmit sensitive information
The qualitative interviews confirmed that senior decision makers were aware of these issues and were keen to change but lacked the budget or funding.
These results made it clear a huge market opportunity existed – but also a sense of apathy and funding challenges to overcome. We wanted to develop a marketing campaign that would put this issue on the agenda at a level where real funding decisions could be taken – the central UK government. We therefore created a campaign that would be unforgettable, borrowing a press led format that lends itself well to stimulating public interest and amplifying conversations.
Telling a story with data
We developed a story from the data that would capture the attention of journalists, the interest of the public, and keep a relatively mundane topic alive in the zeitgeist while we engaged with central government. There are several ways to approach the task of crafting stories from data, but here’s how we did it:
- Narrow down the project to a single, headline grabbing statistic. The golden rule of copywriting is to keep your story simple. We needed to find the one point that would make an intriguing headline and convince people to read on.
- Structure body copy using the following format: quantitative data, qualitative support, opinion, discussion. The initial data points and supporting qualitative quotes from industry experts (or consumers) provide credibility upon which you earn the right to layer opinion and discussion.
- Follow the key rules of data journalism. Writing in the active tense is always faster, more immediate and more engaging. Writing what is happening rather than what is not is more relatable (e.g. £6.6 million is being spent on pagers vs £6.6 million could be saved by…)
- Be relevant. This is often the most overlooked step, but one of the most powerful. Consider your audience, what matters to them and contextualise your story by framing it within what matters to them. In our situation, because our audience was the public, we framed the story in terms of how taxpayer money was funding these devices, and the risks to their healthcare data.
Through this exercise I learned to view the act of writing reports and telling data driven stories as a map-making activity. The first decision cartographers take when drawing new maps is what scale to work with. Too broad and the amount of information is overwhelming. Too narrow and it’s impossible to see the surrounding context or landmarks that act as waypoints.
As controllers of data, we decide what to share and what to omit. Reports are maps that help decision makers navigate the choices before them. To accurately inform decisions, our maps must be comprehensive but focused; including context, landmarks and detail without losing the core message.
The results
The headline we identified (that the UK healthcare system used 10% of the world’s pagers) was reported by national and international outlets, garnering 12m impressions over 121 placements.
This kept the topic alive in the public consciousness long enough for the UK central government to open up a policy review and eventually make recommendations that the legacy pager devices be phased out of the healthcare system.
