Evergreen PR launches pioneering prioritisation services to help healthcare organisations achieve outcomes
Specialist healthcare PR agency, Evergreen PR, has launched a new service to help health organisations to more effectively and efficiently achieve their goals, after identifying an endemic industry-wide focus on activities and outputs over tangible impact.
MERTO – which stands for ‘most effective route to outcomes’ – combines behaviour science methods and prioritisation principles with best practice planning and evaluation to identify the optimum route to achieve an organisation’s target outcome.
Evergreen created MERTO to address the challenge many organisations and marketing and communications teams face in identifying and prioritising the activities that will deliver the most impact with their target goals in mind.
It followed analysis conducted by the healthcare PR agency for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, which found that while 96% of nationally award-nominated campaigns identified the tactics followed, only 32% were able to list a tangible outcome from their work.
The agency has published a report describing how MERTO works, why it works and giving real examples of campaigns where it has worked, as well as illustrative fictional campaigns where its use would have prevented poor performance. The report can be downloaded here.
Evergreen PR’s founder and managing director, Leigh Greenwood, commented:
“In these uncertain and turbulent times, health organisations need, more than ever, to be certain that every pound spent on marketing and communications is focused on delivering priority business and health outcomes rather than just hopeful activity.
”Yet many healthcare marketing and communications teams are not seeing the results that their hard work deserves, meaning that their life-saving products, services and ideas often do not get the level of adoption that they should.”
He continued: “We decided to look into why this is and why so much communications activity delivers only vanity outputs rather than tangible outcomes and discovered that there’s never been an effective methodology for consciously prioritising the actions that will persuade target audiences to behave in the ways needed to deliver outcomes.
“To address this, and prevent practitioners from wasting time, energy and budget on things that have very little impact, we’ve created what we believe is the world’s first ‘conscious prioritisation’ framework - a systematic process, powered by data and behaviour science, that enables us and our clients to isolate the activities that really matter with their goals in mind.”
Developed over the last 12 months, the MERTO framework has been tested and refined in partnership with Evergreen’s growing portfolio of clients and has been behind a series of outcomes-driving campaigns that have won national awards from the CIPR, PR Week and PR Moment this year.
One client that benefitted was the Royal College of GPs, which saw a 645% uptick in GP practice sign-ups to their Veteran Friendly practices programme after Evergreen PR launched a campaign devised using its MERTO process.
“Evergreen PR’s MERTO Framework allowed us to systematically identify our key stakeholder audiences, understand the way that they work and adapt our engagement approach to deliver the best results - the impact has been big upticks in engagement and the delivery of positive organisational outcomes”
In addition to MERTO, Evergreen has also announced the launch of an NHS Adoption Service, which utilises MERTO’s principle of ‘conscious prioritisation’ to enable private healthcare and health tech businesses to maximise their chances of securing NHS contracts.
The agency recently used the method with clinical software provider, Meddbase, helping the company to demonstrate how it can improve NHS efficiency and patient activation. Its thought-leadership campaign secured more than 100 organic NHS leads and several NHS Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) are now in late-stage conversations about purchasing the platform - while some already have.
“When it comes to healthcare PR I wouldn’t work with anyone else! They smashed it out of the park, helping us open the door to a new market and ensuring we achieved the proof of concept we were looking for. The campaign only launched a few months ago but it has already helped to drive tangible revenue.”
“With record NHS waiting lists, rising long-term conditions, an ageing population and a cost-of-living crisis, we are at a pivotal time for healthcare in this country,” said Mr Greenwood.
“The government is betting on the private sector and has committed to making more use of it and to also protecting the NHS technology budget - yet many organisations that hold solutions to the health service’s problems don’t know how to make themselves ‘NHS Adoption-Ready’.
“Our proven NHS Adoption Service has already delivered significant contracts for our health tech and med tech clients and, with our purpose of transforming health in mind, we’re looking forward to helping many more growth-focused health organisations through our outcomes-centred approach.”
To mark the launch of its new services, Evergreen has created MERTO Uncovered - a free 9-part email series aimed at PR, marketing and communications professionals, that uncovers the secrets to health communications that drive tangible ROI.
Learn more about Evergreen’s new services and sign up to the free MERTO Uncovered series to access the behaviour science and prioritisation secrets that deliver business and health outcomes.