About this resource

To help you plan your communications, we have created a calendar that provides you with:

• Communication opportunities (Awareness dates)
• Key Healthwatch dates
• Religious dates you might want to mark

This calendar has 12 separate tabs, one for each month. Within each tab you'll find:

1. A full month calendar view so you can see what's coming up at a glance.
2. Suggested content for the campaign / a space for you to write more information about the campaign.
3. Links of where you can go for more information about specific campaigns.

An effective communications strategy is important. It can help you engage local people, encourage them to use your service and bring to the attention of health and care services the improvements that people want.

This guide aims to help you consider the key ingredients for developing an effective communications strategy for your organisation. We have also developed a strategy template you can use locally. 

1. What do you want your communications to achieve?

It is vital to start by being clear about what you want your communications to achieve. So start by writing a purpose statement that explains how your communications will help deliver the objectives of your service.

Express your statement in plain English and try to answer the questions:

• What would success look like?
• How will our communications make sure we successfully achieve our objectives?
• What are we hoping to achieve with communications (change in attitude, greater awareness, behaviour change)?

2. Understand where you are now

Before you get into the detail, it is essential to recognise the context within which you communicate.

Be clear:

• How does your strategy links to your strategic priorities?
• What do you know about your audience?
• What have you learnt from your previous communications, and
• other factors like the external environment?

One tool for helping you assess the context is a SWOT analysis. A SWOT enables you to think about your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats when it comes to questions like:

• The communication skills you have in-house or can purchase;
• The capacity you have available to communicate;
• The access you have to the right channels to reach your audience;
• The insight you have on what your audience thinks and feels and how they act;
• The customer experience you provide and the levels of trust people have in your service; and
• Your ability to creatively engage your audiences with your communications.

3. Identify your audiences and set your objectives

At this point, it is essential to think about who you want to engage with your communications. The more you define your audience, the better the outcomes will be, but it’s necessary also to ask:

• Why? Or in other words what’s the purpose?
• How will you do it?
• What will be the outcome?

Answering these questions can help you ensure that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound).

These are just example objectives, and you might have different outcomes you want to achieve, such as:

• Increasing the loyalty or frequency of people who use your service;
• New professionals seeking your advice and insight;
• Reducing the churn of volunteers; or
• More partners who advocate on your behalf.

4. Harness your insight & develop a clear proposition and message

Your detailed, audience-specific messaging will change with each campaign. Yet, at a strategic level, you need to understand your proposition for each audience and the consistent points you want to get across every-time you communicate.

Your proposition should tell your audience the value of the service you are offering or how it meets their needs.

To develop a compelling proposition (and the messages that support it), you need to understand your audience needs and interests, why they engage with Healthwatch and the barriers that might prevent them.

5. Decide how you will reach people and encourage them to act

Insight also plays a big role in deciding which channels or approaches you will invest in to deliver your strategy. Questions to consider include:

• How do people find you?
  • Using search
  • Using social media
  • Via PR in the local media
  • Via on-line and off-line partnerships with services or community groups
  • Via email or events
• Once they find you, do they have a good experience and act?
• Once they act, do they come back to you? Do they tell others about you?

It’s unlikely that you will only invest in one channel. Still, you need to understand which channels deliver you the greatest return, which channels you need to improve and the journey you want your audience to take.

6. Describing your approach

The crux of your strategy is to choose what tactics you will focus on to achieve your objectives. The tactics you choose should link back to the context and be based on audience insight. The final tactics can focus on a range of things, including:

• The channels you choose to focus on improving;
• The processes you decide to adopt; and
• The audiences, issues and content types you think you should prioritise.

The vital step is to refine them down to those that you believe will help you best achieve your objectives.

7. Develop your plan and approach

With a rapidly changing environment, we would suggest taking an agile approach to planning how you will deliver your strategy.

First, size work that is not time-sensitive but needs to happen to achieve your objectives and put this into a pipeline that follows a logical order. Taking this approach means that you can adapt to external pressures while still making progress with high priority improvements.

Secondly, plan out the number of time-sensitive communications projects you need to run.   

An agile approach is essential when it comes to delivering communications because the process helps you continually learning from each activity to help maximise the impact of the next.

One model is known as OASIS, where you follow five steps to help bring order and clarity to planning and delivering each communications project.

The five steps you need to create a campaign using OASIS are:

• Objectives
• Audience/Insight
• Strategy/Ideas
• Implementation
• Scoring/Evaluation

The idea is to use this process of constant learning to refresh your approach as you go.

8. Deciding what to measure

Do you know how your communications are working now? What things are worth measuring and why? These are questions you should consider when deciding how you will measure whether your tactics are delivering your objectives.

One way to measure your communications is to think about the journey someone takes when they use any service. First, you become aware of service. Then you think about using it. Then you do use it and, if it meets your needs, you then use it repeatedly. You might even become an advocate, telling others about it.

Other factors you should consider

This guide is not exhaustive. There will be other considerations that you might want to articulate as part of your strategy. These considerations include:

Resources:

• Who will lead on this work?
• Will delivery be in-house, or will an agency do it?
• What is the total budget required?
• Is this funding already in place?

Risks:

• What are the risks of what you are planning to do?
• Are these risks likely? And if yes, what would be the impact?
• What can we do to reduce any impact?
• What assumptions underlie this strategy and have they been tested?

Navigate the toolkit

• Campaign overview
• Objectives
• Target audiences
• Key messages
• FAQs
• Social media messaging
• Social media assets
• Email marketing

About this campaign

Campaign objectives

• Raise awareness of trans+ healthcare experiences: While some research does exist, it's not enough to fully understand the healthcare experiences of the trans+ community. Increasing visibility of the healthcare challenges trans and non-binary people face will help us build an accurate picture of the healthcare landscape they are currently navigating. 

• Amplify trans+ voices to drive change: This project will build on existing research and work by Healthwatch Lewisham to amplify the voices of trans+ people to identify areas for improvement in GP services. 

  It will give the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England (NHSE), the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and other influential stakeholders evidence on people’s experiences, helping to:

  • Influence the NHS Constitution refresh

  • Understand progress on and status of the LGBT Action Plan

  • Influence new NHS England equalities objectives

Who are we targeting?

Key messages 

• There is a lack of research on the healthcare experiences of trans and non-binary people. We want to know what barriers gender-diverse people face when trying to access care, whether general or gender-affirming. 

• GPs are often the first stop on any healthcare journey. But for trans and non-binary people, accessing GP services can be a challenge. We want to find out how GP services canbe more inclusive.

• Shaping the future of healthcare for trans+ communities must be led by their voices and lived experiences. This project aims to identify the gaps in GP services and create a healthcare system that treats every person with the respect and dignity they deserve.

Social media assets

Here are some additional resources that you can use to promote the campaign. 

A4 posters

Instagram reel/story video

Instagram carousel version 1

Instagram carousel version 2

Instagram carousel version 3

Instagram standalone story card

Don't have Canva?

You can download all the social media visuals for this campaign from Brandstencil. You must be logged in to access the assets. 

Go to Brandstencil

About

Health and care services always face the highest demand in winter. In this toolkit, you'll find resources to help you market your services, gather people's health and care experiences and give useful advice and information to the public. 

What's in the toolkit?

• An overview of our approach
• Advice and information resources
• Communication resources to help you market your service
• Links to wider winter campaigns you can support
• Advice on sharing insight and holding services to account
• How to share what you are doing locally

We'll add new resources as and when they are ready. 

An overview

NHS and social care services already face high demand. This winter, pressure on care could be even more significant, and compounded by:

• The existing backlog of care, with waiting lists for elective care at high levels
• New waves of COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other winter illnesses
• Cost of living pressures, with some people physically and mentally affected by cold weather because they've had to cut back on food and heating
• Ongoing collective action by some health professionals

Our focus

You can help support health and care services by:

• Using the experiences that people share with you to help services spot and address issues, and
• Providing advice that helps people stay well and use services effectively

Advice and information

We have reviewed our advice and information content and collated them for you to use on your website and communications channels.

Winter advice and information articles

Marketing your service

We have developed a marketing campaign you can use to promote your service this winter. 

This social media campaign we are planning to start on Monday 4th November 2024. You can launch your own campaigns on the same day, or after, but please don't launch before this date. 

The campaign toolkit has links to Canva assets you can download or edit with your own logo. For any Healthwatch not using Canva you can download these images from Brandstencil. 

Supporting wider NHS campaigns

As part of this year's campaign, we want to help NHS and social care services support people over the winter months. They have a number of campaigns that we'll be supporting at a national level. We encourage you to incorporate these into your winter marketing. The assets are available through the links below.

Prescription savings campaign

Cold weather communications toolkit

Winter vaccinations: 'Get vaccinated. Get Winter Strong'

Stay well this winter campaign

Sharing your insight and holding services to account

As well as quickly relaying positive and negative insight to local decision-makers, please also share your data with us to help keep national policymakers abreast of emerging issues.

Log in to our data sharing platform

You can also use the experiences that people have shared with you to scrutinise the delivery of ICS winter plans. 

About

To help you provide advice and information to the public this winter, we pulled together a collection of relevant content you can use on your website and other communications channels.

If you plan to reproduce this content rather than linking to the advice on our website, please:

• Add local information if you can. For example, provide contact details for local support. 
• Do not use images from our website. The image may be a stock image that you need a license to use. Instead, please source your own photos. 

We'll update this resource as new advice content becomes available. 

Got a content idea?

Get in touch with our communications team if you have an advice article that you think could be used by other local Healthwatch, or have an idea for new advice that could help the public this winter. 

Email the team

• The onboarding of a new website takes up to 8 weeks on average. 
• The process will involve manually transferring some of your content to our template.
• There are several deadlines you will have to meet in terms of transferring content to the new website. 
• Both your commitment and capacity to migrate the content manually, are very important.
• Please explore other Healthwatch websites that are using our template. Here are two examples: Healthwatch Cornwall and Healthwatch Ealing.
• Familiarise yourself with our template, main blocks, and taxonomies. Please ask us to give you access to our template in the form provided.
• The website will be serviced by Circle Interactive, our developers. They will charge you a one-off cost of £120 for onboarding and then £36 per month for running costs. These costs may vary slightly. 
• Healthwatch England will cover support, training and development.
• Please bear in mind, once we go live with your new website it is unlikely you will still be able to access your old website.

Information of how to complete a successful onboarding

• Focus on the content that is relevant ie. the minimum of content you would need to start this new website. This may include new content that you would have to write.
• It is as important to decide on the content you don’t need to transfer, content that is out of date for instance, or hasn’t been viewed by your users in a long while. 
• Download your reports, pictures, and multimedia files on a local drive so these can be uploaded easily to our CMS.
• Please consider keeping less relevant content on your local drives. This will give you the option to republish it after the launch if you need to. 
• It is best to start by transferring your reports and it is advisable to have these ready. Similarly, it helps to prepare the rest of the content you have in advance, for instance, the advice and information articles or events. The last you will transfer will be the pages because they require more work and familiarity with the CMS.
•  Please evaluate the number of articles you would like to transfer, in relation to how many articles to publish per week. This could give you a clear indication of the workload bearing in mind your assigned Senior Admin/Editor or team will have to manually transfer the content to our template.
• We will schedule a call and a training session with your Senior Admin/Editor or team at the beginning of the onboarding to address any issues of concern and cover the basics of publishing on our CMS.
• Support and training will be provided free and on an ongoing basis.

Navigate the toolkit

• Campaign Overview
• Objectives
• Target audiences
• Key messages
• Important links
• Social media
• Resources

About this campaign

The uptake of cervical cancer screening in England is decreasing. Our campaign, which focuses on women’s experiences of cervical screening, offers practical solutions for various stakeholders to help increase cervical screening uptake. 

The campaign also supports NHS England’s ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040 by identifying the barriers to screening that people, especially those groups with lower uptake, are facing.

Visit Healthwatch England's website to read our full report.

Find out more

Campaign objectives

• To provide the latest evidence related to cervical screening uptake through data, qualitative research and stories in blogs, the media and social media, focusing on the most at risk groups.  
• To highlight the role of targeted interventions in addressing low cervical screening rates. 
• To raise awareness of the issue and influence local plans to increase cervical screenings.

Who are we targeting?

Key messages 

• Three-quarters of women who are hesitant about cervical screening would use a self-testing kit if it was available for free on the NHS.   
• A poll of 2,444 women highlights that pain, fear, and misconceptions make them hesitant about taking up invitations for cervical screening appointments. 
• Healthwatch England says a more personalised approach to cervical screening will help the NHS meet its ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040.  
• Healthwatch calls on the NHS to adopt self-testing, sensitive handling of appointments by screening professionals, drop-in clinics, and increased awareness to boost uptake among all women.   

Social media 

Here are some social media posts that you can use to promote the research in your community and with local stakeholders. Please feel free to adapt any copy to suit your context.

Twitter 

Tweet 1

Today @HealthwatchE launched a campaign to help NHS England meet its ambition to eliminate cervical cancer as screening uptake is dropping. Find out more <ADD LINK> #CervicalScreeningMyWay

Social card (73% of women hesitant about cervical screening would use a self-testing kit if it was available free on the NHS).    

Tweet 2

New research from @HealthwatchE shows pain, fear, and misconceptions make women hesitant about attending cervical screening. Did you know you can ask for adjustments during your appointment? Watch the video #CervicalScreeningMyWay <ADD LINK>

Tweet 3

A more personalised approach to cervical screening will help the NHS meet its ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040.  @HealthwatchE set out actions for healthcare leaders #CervicalScreeningMyWay <ADD LINK>

Tweet 4

What would help women attend their cervical screening appointment? The number one priority is having empathetic and sensitive staff. Read women’s views on cervical screening #CervicalScreeningMyWay <ADD LINK>

Social media card (62% women hesitant about cervical screening said sensitivity from healthcare staff about their worries would encourage them to come forward.) 

Tweet 5

We support @HealthwatchE’s calls on the NHS to adopt self-testing kits, sensitive handling of appointments by screening professionals, drop-in clinics, and increased awareness.#CervicalScreeningMyWay <ADD LINK>

Social media card 

("Women's diverse voices and experiences must drive improvements to cervical screening and NHS England's ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040.” Louise Ansari, CEO, Healthwatch England) 

Instagram / Facebook post 1

Today Healthwatch England has launched a campaign to help NHS England meet its ambition to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040 as screening uptake is dropping. 

We join them in calling for sensitive handling of appointments by screening professionals, drop-in clinics, and increased awareness. We also want NHS England to adopt self-testing kits for cervical cancer to help more women and people with a cervix to get screened. 

#CervicalScreeningMyWay <ADD LINK>

Instagram / Facebook post 2

NHS data shows uptake of cervical screening is dropping. Some women find cervical screening uncomfortable and stressful while some feel embarrassed at undressing in front of a healthcare professional. 

Jennifer told us: “Although I got a reminder letter, I delayed booking my appointment by a year, as I found the last one I went to, around four years ago, really stressful.”   

We’ve put together a video of the things you can ask for before and during your next appointment. 

#CervicalScreeningMyWay

<ADD LINK>

In the document below, you will find the questions from our survey. These have been slightly adapted to make them suitable for Healthwatch who may want to use them for a paper survey but are largely the same questions we asked during our research.

Our survey was carried out online using Savanta’s survey platform. Therefore, we were able to use question logic to only show respondents questions relevant to them and filter out people who we did not want to respond. 

Where relevant, we have included alongside question responses the relevant question logic. If you wish to run this as an online survey and are confident using question logic, you can use this to replicate our survey.

About the Healthwatch England media unit 

We are the first point of contact for national media enquiries. We prepare proactive and reactive responses to national issues; draft press releases and blogs; design and deliver national campaigns; recruit and store media case studies; monitor, evaluate and report national media coverage. 

Should we receive requests for comments or interviews from regional and local media outlets eg. a local BBC radio station, we pass the request on to the relevant local Healthwatch to respond to.

We are happy to advise local Healthwatch on media approaches, key messages, and other related issues. There are a number of resources that can help you with PR and media activities. 

Helpful resources 

• Our policy positions can offer the latest lines on various healthcare issues: https://www.healthwatch.co.uk/our-policy-positions
• A variety of communications resources is available on:  https://network.healthwatch.co.uk/resources
• An example of a crisis comms plan is available on: https://network.healthwatch.co.uk/guidance/2021-07-15/risk-and-crisis-communication-plan
• Network newsletter 
• Any significant media coverage is also shared with the network on a regular basis. 

National media outlets 

Should you receive a request for an interview or a comment on a national issue from a national media outlet, do forward it to the national media team to respond to. 

How to get in touch with the national team?  

If you are contacted by a national media outlet or have a question about media/ PR, contact: 

• Anna Galandzij, Media Manager, anna.galandzij@healthwatch.co.uk – Tuesday to Friday 

In her absence, you can direct your queries to: 

• Chris Gorman, Campaigns Manager (Regional), chris.gorman@healthwatch.co.uk or our comms inbox hub@healthwatch.co.uk.

Communications Ambassadors Network (CAN) 

Bi-monthly CAN meetings offer a great opportunity for comms colleagues across the network to come together, share know how, and learn about upcoming national campaigns. Find out more.

Contents

• Background
• What are we doing
• Activity timeline
• Ways to get involved
• Resources

Background

As part of our #ShareForBetterCare campaign, we are launching a national drive to learn about people's eye care experiences.

Eye care is an area where we’re hearing that people are facing long waits and high costs for care. There’s also evidence that eye care and related health issues disproportionately affect specific communities, such as those on low incomes, as well as ethnic minority groups.

That’s why it’s important we understand the eye care challenges people are facing and how to make sure people get timely and affordable access to eye care when they need it. But to do this we need your help.

What are we doing?

On the 29 July 2024, we will launch a survey which aims to:

• Understand people’s experience of accessing eye care locally, as well as the experience of those waiting for secondary care. 
• Uncover what is working but also the barriers people face, like cost. 

We want to hear from everyone, but we especially want to reach: 

• People from ethnic minority communities, including Black African, Black Caribbean and South Asian communities. This is because people from these groups are at a greater risk of developing some of the leading causes of sight loss.
• People who may not have a large household income because of the barriers they may face.
• People waiting for secondary care to understand their experience. 

When is this taking place?

• 29 July 2024: We will launch our survey. 
• 29 July – 7 August 2024: The first activity spike will run for one week, focusing on PR and social media channels.
• 2-8 September 2024: The second activity spike will focus on social media and stakeholder outreach.
• 23-29 September 2024: The third and final activity spike will take place during Eye Care Week and focus on community outreach and social media.
• w/c 2 December 2024 (TBC): We will share our local and national findings.

How can you get involved?

We will provide you with communications resources including social media posts and visual assets, an email template, press notice and website story. You can send the press notice to your local press and publish the website story on your local website, to help promote the survey in your area.  

If you use Smart Survey and want a copy of the survey to use locally, please email us to arrange at research@healthwatch.co.uk 

Some content is still in development and will be updated closer to the launch date – so please check back in for new information and resources.

Please contact the Healthwatch England communications team with any questions: hub@healthwatch.co.uk

Ways to get involved?

• Promote the survey. Collect responses from people in your area to help shape our work. 
• Issue a press notice to your local media.
• Publish the news story on your website advertising the survey. 
• Email local optometrist services and community groups asking for support to share the survey.
• Ask your local council and NHS to share resources.
• Post social content or re-share our message.
• Go out into the community during Eye Care Week (23-29 September) to collect people's experiences.

Got a question?

Contact the Healthwatch England communications team for questions about any of the content included in this pack: hub@healthwatch.co.uk

Contact the Healthwatch England research team for questions about the research survey: research@healthwatch.co.uk