What does digital marketing mean for an organisation like Wellcome?

One of the questions I got asked as I was finishing up at my last job (along with, ‘So what actually *is* Wellcome?’) was, ‘What will you be marketing?’. And honestly I wasn’t completely sure.

Wellcome is not a commercial organisation so our objective for paid marketing is not sales. But it has been helpful to think about what our products are and who our products’ audiences are, to work out when marketing has a role to play.

Wellcome is probably best known for its grant funding schemes: over the past 17 years, we’ve funded £8.7 billion of science research. Our Research product is a pretty unique marketing proposition in that it’s literally giving away money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this means our brand is well-known amongst applicants and recipients of this funding, i.e. the Research community.

So with our Research product reasonably well established I’ve had a bit more time to think about our other product: advocacy. Whilst research funding is important to drive forward Wellcome’s mission to improve health, we also campaign on a number of key issues. But Wellcome is not well known as an advocacy organisation. I wonder if we’ve been lulled into thinking we’re better known than we actually are because of the relatively high brand awareness among our Research audience 🤔.

What this means is that we’ve sometimes approached our global health audience with difficult and costly policy asks before they know who we are or why they should listen to us.

We need to create a stronger foundation before we direct people to focus on our policies. We need to explain Wellcome’s role as an advocacy organisation and what our credentials are for campaigning on particular issues.

We’re looking to do this through a digital brand campaign. We’re planning to test three different creative approaches using social media ads:

• a pure brand proposition
• telling our brand story through one of our priority areas, probably drug resistant infections
• using Wellcome Photography Prize as an introduction to the Wellcome brand

In parallel to the creative development underway, Wellcome’s Product team has been developing a new ‘Policy and Advocacy’ page on wellcome.ac.uk. This will be the page people land on when they click on a social media ad. We’ve previously sent people either to the homepage or to a specific and fairly dense policy page. We hope the new page will lead to higher engagement, measured by longer dwell times and lower bounce rates in Google Analytics.

We’ve also been thinking about the right conversion point for a brand campaign. This is important for a couple of reasons: firstly, it allows the algorithm on social platforms to optimise performance more easily. Secondly, it gives us a metric to measure whether our activity is successful or not. We’re planning to use newsletter signups as our conversion metric because we think this best demonstrates engagement with Wellcome. The other options we considered and rejected were report downloads (because no single report is relevant enough to all of Wellcome’s activity), lead generation (too complex), and number of pages visited (technically impossible to implement).

It’s exciting seeing the various pieces of the brand campaign come together to form a joined-up user journey. I’m also curious to see if there is a qualitative impact on our offline advocacy activity, for example to see if the digital brand activity changes the social interactions we have at events like the World Health Assembly.

If you also work for an organisation that is using your brand as a way to achieve advocacy objectives, I’d love to hear your experience.