Patient & Public Involvement & Engagement initiatives involve, by their very nature, public-facing communication. Recruitment for PPIE members is likely to include printed and digital advertising materials distributed in-person and on social media. Raising awareness of a disease, intervention or research study as part of the PPIE initiative requires determining key messages, creating educational content and driving engagement with the content using various channels. The trustworthiness of messages from the PPIE initiative will be shaped by your public image and brand. While PPIE initiatives certainly do not aim to sell a product for profit, much can be learned from the field of marketing to deliver your messages to an intended audience, recruit members and identify collaborating partners.
Research teams can benefit hugely from having a marketing strategy. Online and social media presence can lead to new partnerships and invitations to speak at events. The visibility of a PPIE initiative can provide legitimacy. Branding, including a color scheme, slogans and key sentiments, can support make the development of advertising materials, graphics, events and presentations. Articulating a primary marketing goal and activities can ensure evaluation approaches demonstrate progress. Consistent monitoring of marketing efforts can also enable teams to report reach and impact to funders and senior leadership.
How can a PPIE initiative develop a marketing strategy? A marketing worksheet (Appendix J) can be used by anyone to think through their goals, activities and branding. Below are some key things a team should consider when building a strategy and an approach:
● Logo (Figure 2): A first task might be to design a logo to use as part of a recognisable brand identity in all public-facing materials.
● Website: Concurrently to creating a logo, an online presence can be built with the creation of a website. The site can serve as a repository of the PPIE group's activities, a source for additional information and signals legitimacy as an active entity.
● Primary Goal: Initially, marketing activities can seem to be sporadic and often feel like an afterthought. This unstructured approach can make the initiative feel resource-intense and somewhat pointless. Setting a primary goal can clarify the purpose of marketing activities, focus efforts, reduce workloads and help set processes to support the activities.
● Process: Due to limited resources, we have kept our marketing activities simple and embedded in day-to-day processes. While we would like to create more interesting audiovisual content or establish presence on new platforms (e.g. Bluesky), we focus on content that is easy for us to produce (simple graphics) and platforms where our institution is active.
● Voice: Our group considered what our public voice should sound like, whether authoritative, professional, casual, knowledgeable, revolutionary or something else. Establishing our desired voice as ‘positive, excited, inquisitive and collaborative’ has meant that every time we create materials, social media posts, events and presentations, we check that we channel these desired characteristics.