How a small charity with a stretched budget turned technical medical content into patient-friendly print, without adding an hour to their administrator’s week.
IndividuallyPagesIndividually addressed packages collated and despatched to hospitals and clinics across the UK and Ireland, alongside a complete suite of patient communication material.
The MDS UK Patient Support Group is a subsidiary of King’s College Hospital’s Haematology Department. They work nationally and internationally with MDS specialists, with Centres of Excellence across the UK and Ireland. Important work, done by a small UK charity, which means every pound of budget has to be allocated with care.
Their administrator carried several other responsibilities alongside print. Their content came from medical writers and a number of different editors. And the material itself presented a particular challenge: highly technical clinical text that had to be translated into a style patients and carers could actually read.
Get the tone wrong in one direction and the content fails clinically. Get it wrong in the other and it fails the patient.
The brief covered newsletters, leaflets, booklets and banners, plus the centrepiece: a detailed Myelodysplastic Syndromes handbook, built from a mix of existing and new designs. Brand and message consistency across every format was non-negotiable, because this material exists to create awareness and provide support for patients and carers at a difficult time in their lives.
The practical constraint underneath all of it was time. The administrator we worked with could not give print her full attention, because print was only one slice of her job. Sound familiar? It is the situation almost every membership organisation and charity lives in.
We worked in tandem with the administrator, the medical writers and the editors to build a single design and print plan that translated the content consistently across all formats. We took the entire print process off her desk, from design through to print, and went further: we became a complete supplier by collating, packaging and despatching individually addressed packets to hospitals and clinics across the country.
One point of contact. One plan. One accountable supplier from first design to final delivery.
Over approximately four months, we helped create a new handbook that now forms the basis of their communication material for years to come. We then collated, packaged and despatched approximately 300 individual packages by Royal Mail and courier. Because we now understand their work processes, communication style and brand expectations, all future reprints and new material have been entrusted to us.
This is an important new big step and piece of work in MDS’s Patient awareness programme. Evolution came up with really great ideas and pictures and the result is simply brilliant. Thank you once again to all at Evolution. Fantastic team work for all your support, kind advice and guidance to us to date.
Sophie Wintrich, Chief Executive, MDS UK Patient Support Group
A small charity’s budget had to be allocated carefully. Building one coherent design and print plan across all formats, rather than buying each item separately, made every pound work harder and removed the duplication that piecemeal buying always creates.
The administrator had several other responsibilities. We removed the entire print burden from her desk, from design to despatch, and reduced her many supplier touchpoints to one. The hours we gave back were hours the charity spent on patients, not on print.
The handbook became the foundation of their ongoing communication. Because we learned their processes, style and brand expectations, all future reprints and new material come to us. The relationship compounds.
If you run a membership organisation with recurring publishing at the heart of it, we should talk.