Working with Patient Advocacy Groups: Effective Approaches to Advocacy Communication and Structure

STUDY OVERVIEW

Esteemed for their dedication to improving health and providing access to relevant information, patient advocacy groups are uniquely positioned to inform and educate consumers. This benchmarking study identifies effective communication practices for bio-pharmaceutical organizations seeking to better collaborate and manage relationships with key patient advocacy groups. In addition, this study explores different organizational structures for pharma advocacy groups, as well as critical competencies for advocacy liaisons.

Best Practices, LLC designed this benchmarking study to help companies identify key benchmark metrics, executive insights and recommendations that can be used to increase effectiveness when working with patient advocacy groups. In addition it also uncovers current trends, lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid while collaborating with patient advocacy groups.

KEY TOPICS

• Advocacy Communication Practices
• Structuring High-Performance Bio-Pharmaceutical Advocacy Groups
• Critical Competencies for Advocacy Liaisons
• Current Trends and Future Directions in Patient Advocacy
• Lessons Learned, Pitfalls and Successes

• Types of organizational structure used by pharma advocacy groups
• Approaches used to measure effectiveness of activities for developing relationships with patient advocacy groups
• How ensure external patient advocacy groups can contact pharma groups working in advocacy
• Number of full time employees dedicated to patient advocacy activities
• Average number of years of experience of employees working with patient advocacy groups
• Issues in patient advocacy forecast to be most important in the near future
• Types of lessons learned, pitfalls and success stories about relationships in patient advocacy

• Building Infrastructures for Fast and Effective Response:

  Develop an expertise structure to support rapid response to external special interest groups – both positive and negative – to allow immediate resolution of issues and support intelligence gathering. Create a communications infrastructure for rapid response. Deputize communications leaders for hostile interactions, and centralize information management and response protocols. Stay informed through rapid global updates on hostile group activities.

  Respond locally to attacks to avoid global issue spread. Never antagonize groups whose interests diverge from yours

METHODOLOGY

Insights are drawn from survey responses from a total of 58 research participants at 43 pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies. More than a dozen in-depth interviews were conducted to gather more detailed information pertinent to this study. Approximately half of the benchmark class (28 participants) consisted of executives representing top 50 bio-pharmaceutical companies.

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