Excellence in Public Health Communications

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This category recognises excellence in programmes designed to increase public awareness of and sense of responsibility for maintaining or safeguarding public health and well-being. These will typically include communication programmes for the ‘greater good’.

Public health refers to all organised measures (whether public or private) to prevent disease, promote health and prolong life among the population as a whole. Its activities aim to provide conditions in which people can minimise the risk of illness, can be healthy and focuses on entire populations. These populations can be as small as a local neighbourhood, or as big as an entire country or region of the world, but not individual patients or specific groups of health consumers. Thus, public health is concerned with the total system and not only the eradication of a specific disease.

Entries should provide information/advice designed to bring about changes of perceptions and/or behaviour that will result in:

• Improvements in public health
• Benefits to delivery of care to patients or service users
• Raised awareness and maintenance of healthy lifestyles
• Prevention of the onset of disease
• Early detection and diagnosis of disease
• Reduced health inequalities and/or other societal goals relevant to health.

Please note that the judges will be looking for real evaluation focused on outcomes in the areas above as opposed to surrogate markers of programme success such as outputs, outtakes, OTS, coverage etc.

Entries are invited from any individual, team or service that has made an impact on public health. Judges will be looking for evidence of real patient outcomes, behavioural change and a sustained response.

It is essential that you specify which (if any) coverage was paid for and the budget allocated for the campaign or project by band.

Work conducted during the two year period between January 2019 and December 2020 will be eligible. If the submission has been entered previously, the current entry must provide benchmarks to clearly demonstrate how the programme was evaluated and how it has developed over time.

Remember: anonymise your entry.

Don’t forget:
- provide a copy of any previous submission for this work
- be open! Were there any other contributors to the programme?

JUDGING CRITERIA AND ENTRY FORMAT:

Entry Title

Please give a simple title for your entry of no more than ten words

Executive Summary – 200 words. 0 (zero) marks

This will be used if entry is selected as a finalist and does not need to be anonymised.

Main entry

• The word/character limit for each criterion will be outlined via the online entry system, which is new for 2021.

1. Budget Band Information, as below:

Band A under £10,000
Band B £10,001-£25,000
Band C £25,001-£50,000
Band D £50,001-£100,000
Band E £100,001-£200,000
Band F over £200,001.

If your client has declined to allow this, you must state this within your submission.

• Failure to provide the budget band seriously impacts the judge’s ability to assess the entry against other entries and may result in the entry being disqualified
• The budget band provides important context for judging the innovation, delivery and impact of a piece of work.
• Impressive work is not always dependent on budget size, so there is no right or wrong budget.

2. Situation Analysis and Benchmarking – 15 marks (300 words)

• In this section you should show the judges how well you understood the situation at the start of the project
• Use this situation to clearly lay out benchmark data that you will refer to in your measurement of effectiveness later
• Show the judges the best information, data and insights you have about uptake of health interventions, current practice, defining/ segmenting audiences, identifying educational or information needs, which channels will best reach the audience, competitive environment, creative landscape before the start of your work

3. Objectives – 15 marks (250 words)

• Describe the objectives for the project or programme and specifically how these will be measured.

4. Strategy – 15 marks (250 words)

• Please outline what your strategy was and why
• Refer to the data and insight in the situation analysis section
• Explain why this was the right strategy and any points to emphasise bold or innovative strategy selection

5. Implementation – 15 marks (400 words)

• Please describe how you implemented the project or programme
• Please briefly outline why these specific tactics were selected
• For a programme this should include describing what tactics were deployed to implement the strategy
• For a meeting or stand-alone event this should describe how the meeting or event was delivered

6. Effectiveness: Outcomes vs Objectives – 20 marks (400 words)

• Show clearly how the programme or project delivered against the stated objectives
• Help the judges to understand how the effectiveness was measured so they can judge the strength of the evaluation
• Include comments from third party stakeholders in this section but ONLY if they clearly help to demonstrate the impact of the work and were a planned part of the measurement approach

Supporting Materials

Please remember that the first round of scoring is based only on the content of the two-page entry form. No supporting material is viewed at this stage.

Please only send information that helps the judges to see how you researched, planned, implemented and measured the programme within each specific category, e.g.:

• Information illustrating how the strategy was brought to life is helpful but we don’t need a copy of every item
• Information supporting the evaluation and measurement is the most relevant
• ESSENTIAL: a summary sheet must be supplied detailing each piece of supporting material and clearly identifying where evidence can be found to support claims in the entry
• PLUS: An approved visual image or video that supports the entry for use in print, results pages online and in the AV.