CharityComms

Getting people with MS involved in their latest awareness-raising campaign has improved the quality of MS Society communications team output. Head of Communications Matthew Trainer tells Trina Wallace about the charity’s Putting the Pieces Together campaign.

Busy launching the charity’s biggest campaign for five years, MS Society Head of Communications Matthew Trainer wasn’t expecting a phone call from Chelsea Football Club. The premier league club’s marketing officer was calling to see if they could run one of the charity’s Putting the Pieces Together adverts in their match day programme.

“It was remarkable to flick through the Fulham v Chelsea programme and see an MS Society ad right next to ones for aftershave, Barclays bank and the Army,” says Trainer. “But they said it was really fresh and different and that they weren’t aware MS affected young people.”

Repositioning the charity

This is the kind of reaction Trainer and his 12-strong communications team set out to promote when they first started work on the campaign back in February. In preparation for the charity’s rebrand later this year, the campaign’s aim was to reposition the MS Society as a more dynamic charity to younger people affected by MS.

But Trainer was surprised to be contacted by Chelsea FC because Putting the Pieces Together is an awareness-raising campaign targeted at women aged between 20 and 40, the gender and age group most likely to be diagnosed with MS.

He says the campaign has made an impact outside its target audience because it was devised, from day one, by both men and women living with MS.

Involving users

“The concept came out of our extensive research with people with MS,” says Trainer. “It showed us that everything is thrown up in the air when you’re diagnosed with MS and that you have to come to terms with the diagnosis to put the pieces back together.”

After researching and interviewing eight advertising agencies, Trainer and his team briefed the chosen design consultancy Spencer du Bois on these findings. They then ran 14 research groups all over the country. An online forum, with around 100 participants, was also set up to gauge people’s opinions on how MS affects relationships, careers, everyday routine and social lives, all issues which feature in the ads.

Even the models in the four campaign posters have MS and were recruited through the charity’s online forum, monitored by Trainer. He and staff at Spencer du Bois interviewed them and it’s their hard-hitting but honest words on the campaign posters. Before this, the charity used copywriters’ language in ads.

Driven by members

“It was important that people with MS were involved in devising the campaign because it’s such a personal thing, the way it affects people is so different,” says Trainer. “We could also say to our members, ‘This has been driven by you, it’s not been dreamt up by an advertising agency’.”

Research groups were set up to test the near-final versions of the posters. And since it was launched in September, comments on the charity’s online forum have mostly been positive. “Some people with severe MS have said ‘This doesn’t reflect me’ but we’d have needed 50 different campaigns to please everyone. We had to pick a chunk of people to target and go with that. So if a 55 year old man with MS complains about the ad, we’ll listen but know that we weren’t targeting him.”

Evaluation

Trainer says he’ll know whether the campaign has been a true success by the end of the year. Not-for-profit think tank nfpSynergy will be evaluating awareness of the campaign, its financial impact will be measured through tied-in direct mail fundraising and web hits will be monitored too. “We’re anticipating more than £1.2million worth of coverage, more than double the investment,” says Trainer.

In total, 10 people from the MS Society itself, the design consultancy and media buying agency, Total Media Charities & Campaigning Organisations, have worked on the campaign. Trainer says finding an organic fit with partners which knew instinctively what kind of an organisation the charity is, was crucial to this collaborative work.

Lessons learnt

“Time has been the hardest thing,” he says. “We could have done with three more months to get the PR for the campaign right. But it has been a good idea to tie-in the campaign to local awareness-raising. So we’ve asked our local volunteer branches to put the posters up in GP surgeries, for example.”

Finally, Trainer says he’s learnt that charity communicators coordinating campaigns shouldn’t be afraid to expose themselves to frank criticism from the people they’re working for. “Getting input from people with MS has improved the quality of what we put out,” he says. “It’s given us a sense that we’re working for our most important stakeholders and that we’re genuinely reflecting what they’re going through.”