PRCA MENA MHW – The superpower of a good cause – Emily Cope-Smith, Senior Account Manager, Hill+Knowlton Strategies

If you have the power to make a child’s wildest dreams become a reality, bring their imagination to life and  give them a memory that will last forever, then you are in a pretty powerful and meaningful industry. Not many people can say that, right?

People working in PR can proudly claim that they make this difference. There’s so much good that we, as an industry, are doing and this is something that I always wanted to do. I have always wanted to make a difference. This may sound cliché, and for many, PR does not sound like the obvious field for making positive change – but I disagree. Just read the opening lines again and let that sink in, or more powerfully – picture the smiles, the joy and pride that come through working on such inspiring projects. Through our power of creativity and our obsession for new, imaginative ideas, we can make a real difference and drive meaningful campaigns that have real impact.

Referring to those moments of children’s smiles, a  campaign that stands out to truly demonstrate the #PowerOfPR is Hill+Knowlton Strategies’ (H+K) work with Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH), a world-class paediatric hospital in London. Despite the highly specialised international care GOSH provides, its brand awareness in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries is relatively low when compared to its high-profile status in the U.K.

GOSH is doing heroic work, and to help unmask its secret identity we drew from the power of social listening. The insights helped us identify a gap in how patients experienced care, which led to our idea: We could offer patients an experience away from their everyday realities and remind them of how special and powerful they really are by turning them into superheroes.

In 2018, and again in 2020, we transformed young children with serious health conditions at GOSH into their superhero alter egos, in partnership with an initiative called Superhope.

We asked the children: “If you were a superhero, how would you imagine yourself?” A best-selling illustrator then captured these answers and sketched out the children’s imagination onto a page. And unbeknown to the children, a children’s costume studio turned the drawings into super-suits.

On the reveal day, we surprised the children with their bespoke costumes, as well as a professional photoshoot and their own concept CGI trailer shoot led by globally renowned talent. We were giving them much more than a costume. It gave them the chance to not only remove their label of “patient” and feel like children again – but also the superheroes they imagined themselves to be.

Having a good cause at the heart of our work meant we could not only pull off an award-winning, impressive campaign on a shoestring budget, but we could also create a life-changing experience for the children involved. It meant we could find the most amazing pro-bono talent in unexpected places – from a world-class celebrity photographer to a CGI compositor from The Avengers: Infinity War movie. We even secured a pro-bono partnership with VOX Cinemas across the Gulf to showcase the children’s superhero film, to capture the experience all the way to the big screen.

But what really mattered wasn’t so much what our KPIs were set against. Though we exceeded PR and business KPIs, the real impact was that 15 children, going through an extremely traumatic and scary time, had a real superhero boost. Staff across the hospital commented on the new lease of confidence for our GOSH superheroes. One child even stayed in her superhero outfit for three weeks and wore it to all her outpatient appointments!

As PR professionals, we may not be the superheroes on the front page – and we shouldn’t be. Our secret superpower is finding the human purpose and good cause to drive a campaign and most importantly, uncovering the real superheroes among us and letting them shine. For us in H+K’s Health+Wellness practice, we follow the philosophy about treating people as people, not patients. With a good cause and human stories at the centre, anything is possible. That’s the true power of PR.

Emily Cope-Smith, Senior Account Manager, Hill+Knowlton Strategies