Rare Disease Awareness Month Campaign

Project Synopsis

Developed and managed a marketing campaign for Rare Disease Awareness Month that encouraged patient participation and helped spread awareness for rare diseases.

  • Joanne L. - Marketing Designer

  • Megan B.- Marketing Manager

  • Brittany D. - Marketing Manager

  • Ashanthi D. - Patient Advocacy Partnerships Manager

  • Alessandra P. - Strategic Partnerships Manager

Context & Problem

February is Rare Disease Awareness Month, and with PicnicHealth primarily working within the rare disease space, it’s important for us to really show our support and help bring awareness to the rare disease community.

While we have tried to develop multiple campaigns to help celebrate various condition awareness months previously, none have really been deemed as successful. “Success” meaning we’ve never gotten a large amount of community participation, aside from patient advocates who we directly would reach out to.

Goal

Step 2: Ideate

Team

Step 1: Empathize

For this project, we really had to step into the patient’s shoes and get an understanding of what they really want. We understand that as a patient living with a rare disease, there’s an abundance of hardships that they go through that’s caused by their condition, varying from things such as emotional hardships, stress, and financial burden. While PicnicHealth tries to ease the burden that’s caused by the loads of medical records that many rare disease patients have to manage, that really only helps a small part of their problems.

A few months prior to this project, PicnicHealth acquired Allstripes, another company who focused on the recruitment of rare disease patients and medical records for research studies. After doing some digging, we found that before the acquisition, they had done a campaign where they had patients share a “#RareSnapshot” which was compiled of photos that patients would take, showing different experiences within their everyday lives. Our team loved this idea of patients sending in photos and videos, and wanted to create our own version.

To kickoff this project, the growth team needed to have a brainstorm session. Within this meeting, our goal was to talk through what Allstripes did for their campaign previously, and then figure out how to make it our own, and make sure that the patients that we’ll be sharing this out to will be interested.

For this campaign, we decided to host a contest where patients could win 1 of 3 prizes: (1) Free PicnicHealth account + $100 gift card or a (2) $100 gift card. In order to enter, they would have to “#ShareYourRare”, which means sharing their rare disease story with us by either filling out a submission form, through video, or with photos. With the content that we receive from this contest, we would then post quotes on our stories and socials to help bring awareness to all of these different conditions.

On top of this contest, we would also be developing blog posts with our partners so that patients could learn more about how they can help support rare disease research.

At the end of this meeting, we were able to finalize what this campaign would be, action items, and what deadlines each of us needed to meet.To kickoff this project, the growth team needed to have a brainstorm session. Within this meeting, our goal was to talk through what Allstripes did for their campaign previously, and then figure out how to make it our own, and make sure that the patients that we’ll be sharing this out to will be interested.

Step 3: Prototype

While each person got to work on their tasks for this campaign, I was in charge of design and copy for our emails, blog posts, and social media posts. In order to be able to start building out anything, I first had to create a submission form to send out to patients.

To reiterate, one of our top goals was to get as much community participation as possible. To do this, we needed to build out a submission form for patients to share their story. Through this form, patients could submit answers, photos, or videos in order to be entered in the contest. In an attempt to further incentivize them, we had video submissions count as 3 entries, where text and photo would just count as 1. This submission form would then be posted to social media, our blog, and be sent through email to patients who were already using PicnicHealth.

Once that was completed and all of the email and blog copies went through the necessary edits, I had created the graphics for everything. Once I completed that, we were ready to launch!

Step 4: Implement

We first posted about the contest on our social channels, but found that submissions were slower than we wanted. However, once we sent out the email announcing the contest, the submissions came rolling in. As they came in, I would then develop and design social posts that would be posted to our feed and story. This contest continued to run until Rare Disease Day (February 28th), which is when we announced the winners.

The results from this campaign are shown below:

As you can see, this campaign was extremely successful and taught us what type of approach to take for future campaigns.

Impact

Process

Team

What I Did

  • Project Manager

  • Graphic Designer

  • Copywriter/Editor

  • Social Media