NHS cancer alliance

The client

A collection of organisations and people with a single aim – to improve cancer services through early diagnosis, screening programmes, and reporting on data.

Delivering the national cancer programme locally, they engage with healthcare professionals, charities and policymakers, as well as patients and the public general public and internally among staff members too.

It’s critical that their message is clearly articulated to these very different audience types so that people understand the value of the organisation and their work in improving cancer survival outcomes is supported.

The challenge

Like so many NHS organisations, this collection of brilliant, dedicated healthcare professionals are doing vital work which needs to be communicated clearly to different stakeholders – but there isn’t an abundance of time or budget to help make this happen. Good internal communications are also essential so that everything runs smoothly behind the scenes, to reduce the mental load and enable staff to find out about news, events and opportunities for training.

It was felt that no one truly felt able to sum up succinctly the mission, vision or goals of the organisation. There was an ongoing challenge about how to communicate to very different audiences, from patients and the general public, to the workforce, the third sector, government bodies, and medical research institutions.

This lack of clarity fed through to the website and social media activity, which led users to feel confused about how to find the information they need. There was a real opportunity to tighten the position, sharpen the messaging, and improve processes behind the scenes.

The services

Working in partnership with Priority Digital Health, who were leading on the project:

• Audit and analysis

• Messaging framework and refreshed tagline

• Communications toolkit featuring templates for case studies, blog posts and press releases

• Communications masterclass with the team

The numbers

• 10 insights gathering calls

• Analysis of 2 websites, 4 social media accounts, 1 email newsletter plus competitor communications and National Cancer Strategy documents

• 1 full audit report, with visual appendix and spreadsheet breakdown

• 1 competitor review with visual appendix

• 3 x SEO reports

• 1 communications masterclass for 15 people

Having clarified the organisation’s challenges, channels and priorities through our audit questionnaire, we carried out 10 one-to-one interviews with team members to capture their insights and opportunity for change.

We conducted a channel-by-channel review across the website, social media and email marketing, and looked at three competitors at their healthcare marketing activity. We also looked at team workflow, to spot opportunities to improve communications across the team and in the way they work.

From this, we produced a report which set out the strategic priorities and recommendations.

• Developing a messaging framework defining the three pillars of content and the messaging that would work for each audience

• Redesign the website to simplify the user journey and follow best practice in SEO, accessibility and NHS Digital content guidelines.

• Develop a content strategy to reshape the weighting of each channel in line with the different audiences

• Demonstrate impact through case studies, infographics, video and podcast content

The report was presented to the wider team in person, including a draft of the messaging framework and starter suggestions for the tagline. Working collaboratively, we decided on the tagline that afternoon – and this will be rolled out across the website, social media profiles and in documents when the website is relaunched.

Phase two

• Communications masterclass to embed the approaches across the team and share best practice in writing for the web, in accordance with NHS Digital content guidelines and the European Accessibility Act

• Website redesign, with input into content and navigation

• Ongoing support if needed, to develop website and video content, and produce case studies and similar collateral