How we got the House of Lords to pay tribute to our client

If you are reading this then it might be because your PR agency hasn’t yet got the House of Lords to pay tribute to you in a debate. That’s understandable, it doesn’t happen every day.

However that’s what we achieved last week with our client, the British Tinnitus Association (BTA), who we partnered with for our first big agency campaign. 

It was the culmination of a whole host of strategic PR and public affairs activity and it ended with the Lords saying that they would like to “pay tribute” to the work of the BTA in raising awareness of the mental health impact of tinnitus. 

It was actually the first time that tinnitus had EVER been debated in the House of Lords and it came off the back of an integrated PR, public affairs and social media campaign that led to:

• Blanket media coverage including The Times, ITV News, Daily Mail, The Independent and the Daily Mirror, among others

• 100,000+ petition signatures

• An agreement from the Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, to look at tinnitus funding

• Meetings with major research-funders

So how did we achieve all of this?

Step 1 - By building on the work of our client

Agencies are often keen to demonstrate their expertise early on in a new client relationship. However, this can lead to radical changes of direction and a failure to really get to grips with what’s been done before. In-house teams have usually been working on the subject matter for many years and can provide an enormous amount of learning - this is especially true in the health sector.

The BTA’s Chief Executive was a published author on a number of scientific papers and so we made it our priority to digest these, understand them and use them as the foundation for our campaign.

Step 2 - Identifying the audience

Our remit was to bring about a conversation on the need to increase the level of funding for tinnitus research and get the attention of those that could make it happen. 

We knew that would require us to engage with a large number of stakeholders, both to inform our calls to Government and to help us drive these through. Through extensive desk research we identified politicians with tinnitus, expert academics, major research-funders in neuroscience, clinicians, patient support groups and people with tinnitus. Together this group had the expertise needed to understand the impact of the condition, the state of play with research, what the research priorities should be and how to push this through with the Government. 

Step 3 - bringing everyone together

In order to benefit from the shared expertise of our stakeholders and to create a sense of shared ownership, we brought everyone together at the Tinnitus Roundtable event at the House of Commons. 

This fantastic event - kindly hosted by Sir John Hayes MP, who had spoken of his own tinnitus in the past - led to vibrant discussions and ideas from participants and created personal relationships with a number of people who proved to be incredibly generous in their support going forward.

Sir John Hayes was so inspired by the event that, when he left, he headed straight to the Chamber for a debate on Health and Social Care and asked the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, about more funding for tinnitus - and this created the foundations for the political interest that would follow.

Step 4 - finding the news story

To take this campaign to the mainstream it was really important that we brought out the emotional element of living with tinnitus and that we made the story human.

We conducted research of 1,600 people with tinnitus to find out more about the mental health impact of the condition and how it affects their lives.

The results were definitive - showing a massive impact on personal wellbeing, relationships, social lives and careers. A significant proportion of people said that they had even had suicidal thoughts, which provided us with our headline - though there was a huge amount of depth to the story underneath this.

Step 5 - focus on delivery

Too many PR agencies deliver lightweight campaigns that are backed by a few spurious stats in a press release and that do little to truly present their client as an expert.

Presentation and delivery is incredibly important when it comes to demonstrating to experienced health correspondents and editors that your findings should be taken seriously.

We produced a whole package of collateral to show the depth of the work that had been done to come to this point. The Tinnitus Manifesto was an eight-page document including background on the condition, discussion points from the Tinnitus Roundtable event, findings from the research and clear calls to Government. This was accompanied by a punchy press release with write-ups and videos of two excellent case studies.

A strategic outreach approach engaged journalists from key target publications, enabling us to build the story together with a few trusted contacts and then to spread it more widely. The approach allowed us to hit a huge number of tier 1 publications and create the push needed to ensure politicians had to take note.

The momentum of the campaign was maintained through social media activity promoting the petition for the general public to sign and we engaged with Made In Chelsea star, Jamie Laing, who agreed to be interviewed by the Daily Mail - which gave the campaign another big push past 20,000 petition signatures and it just kept on climbing. Change.org were so impressed with the organic reach of the petition that they later shared it by email with users they thought might be interested and it’s currently at a mind-blowing 100,000+ signatures.

Both we and the BTA are delighted with the results. The discussion with politicians and research-funders has been well and truly opened and we’re working hard to maintain the momentum. By maintaining our strategic focus, we hope to secure the increase in funding that we know tinnitus research requires and deserves. As the research was titled, it’s ‘Time to Listen’.