How Alzheimer’s Research UK Positions Itself as a Key Voice in Dementia Research

Alzheimer’s Research UK turned to Cision to take advantage of features that include accurately monitoring coverage, a vast database of journalists and other contacts, and analytics capabilities.

“We have a number of people that we have to communicate with, the largest one being the general public in the UK and internationally,” said Laura Phipps, PhD, Head of Communications & Engagement at Alzheimer’s Research UK. “There are so many charities in the UK that in order to raise our profile, it’s important to make people aware that dementia is an issue that urgently needs greater support. We need to galvanize that support that will ultimately allow us to fund more pioneering research.”

Additionally, Phipps and her team want to position Alzheimer’s Research UK as an influential voice in dementia research.

“We want to grow our brand to attract donations, and, at a broader level, we also want to grow our influence in terms of what research is being focused on; be a key voice amongst researchers and policymakers,” said Phipps.

Using Cision, Phipps and her team can now get the full picture of their communications strategy.

“Cision allows us to have a broader view of how we’re doing,” said Phipps. “We can monitor how we’re doing and areas we can improve on, analyze the kind of coverage we get, and compare that to the rest of the sector. Is there a shift on how dementia is being covered in the media, what type of outlet it’s being covered in, what kind of sentiment prevails about the subject, or who is talking about dementia? These are all questions we can now answer, which allows us to be very strategic with our communications.”

Alzheimer’s Research UK can now identify opportunities for them to start to talk about dementia, or to capitalize on discussions that are already happening. For example, if the team sees that there is a lot of coverage about dementia that is driven by celebrities, but they are not mentioned in those pieces of coverage, Cision helps them develop longer-term strategies to make sure they are part of that conversation moving forward.

Cision offers Alzheimer’s Research UK access to a wide and accurate influencer database. Using filters such as geography and topics, Alzheimer’s Research UK can now easily identify influencers they can target and send personalized outreach to.

“When it came to comparing coverage with our partner, we could see that Cision gave us a broader picture of coverage.” said Phipps. “Overall, the platform allowed us to monitor how the campaign performed with a high level of detail and allowed us to see the key moments in that campaign as well.”

Understanding what key message is getting out to their targeted audience provides invaluable insights. They also found the report to be very granular when it comes to demographics.

By setting up specific key audiences they would like to reach, they could see if they were actually reaching those demographics, with what message, how they compared to the sector’s average, and even how they compared to charities with whom they never had a benchmark before.

“This process really puts the onus on you as the comms team on finding out what you actually want, what are your ultimate goals, what key message are you trying to track, what does success look like to us,” said Phipps. “It’s a great process to go through, kind of a test and learn, and the data is so much more meaningful than we’ve ever had before. It’s very useful to be able to have that kind of information to bring back to our board of directors.”