Creating accessible content to support clinical study recruitment

The brief

The Be Part of Research website includes content such as news, blogposts and feature articles to draw users into the site, increase their knowledge of and interest in health and care research and – ultimately – to encourage them to sign up to take part in a study.

The NIHR communications teams need a steady stream of content to add to the site to support their clinical study recruitment efforts, and asked Campus PR to help them deliver this.

Our response

We worked with the NIHR to decide on which topics to cover, drawing on popular website search terms, priority areas for NIHR, and looking at the most read formats and subject matters already on the NIHR website.

The topics started out fairly broad, including conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, obesity and multiple sclerosis. We carried out desk research to drill down and select NIHR-funded research studies on each disease or research area that would most likely resonate with their target audiences and pulled these together to create detailed article outlines.

Once these were agreed by the NIHR, we wrote up the full blogpost or article. Sometimes we could draw on already approved copy around each study, but some articles would involve interviewing  the lead researchers involved to gain a fresh perspective and the latest insights.

For each article, our goal was to tell stories about how individual research studies are working to deliver improved ways to prevent, diagnose or treat health conditions, along with the benefits they hope to deliver to communities across the country.

The articles were written to fit NIHR language and style guidelines for public-facing content and clinical study recruitment materials, ensuring they met high standards of accessibility.