Going Beyond Visuals to Connect with Diverse Audiences

While representation in marketing materials is important for DE&I, what other tactics can healthcare marketers utilize to ensure their outreach goes beyond visuals and truly connects with diverse audiences on a deeper level? 

I think that, you know, is still within the context of marketing materials in great content and engaging audiences effectively, you know, even beyond what we can do as a marketing organization and developing those experiences that go direct to those customers, is how we can also find creative ways to make an impact with some of the broader organizations that are also trying to advocate for that incredible change. So, you know, back to the rare disease context, again, there are advocacy groups that are working tirelessly to try to help people with rare diseases, both in terms of you know, their journey to diagnosis, their journey to treatment, and ultimately, you know, supporting them bringing them together in creating these tight communities so that they feel that they have a group of folks that they can really count on. So, working with the advocacy organizations, investing in them as much as we can, and supporting some of their broader causes is something that is very near and dear to our heart. And in fact, one of the ways that we not only, you know, talk about the need for change, but deliver an act upon it, is through our 501c3, which is greater good. And greater good has an arm called honeycomb health. And honeycomb health is our purpose-built solution to help people with rare diseases by offering free storefronts to any advocacy group that wants one. So, we build the storefront, we have all the merchandise up in the store, and then they're able to generate revenue to support their cause by selling all of this great material online. So that's something we're pretty proud of. I'd love to show you a video in a minute. Through the Manny awards, we've just earned a nomination for the heart award. So, we pulled together a video clip to be able to share at the award ceremony and it just does a really nice job and kind of telling the story and one of the ways that that we're delivering on, you know, how we can truly help versus just talk about it. We really believe in the act of change.

A couple of other thoughts just on the broader question around what we can do beyond marketing materials, is the way that we build our own teams, and the marketing groups that are working on the marketing materials and the work that we're building to try to engage these groups effectively. And that is making sure that our marketing teams are diverse. And also, if possible, even creating an advisory board in some cases where people have a deeper understanding of the people that we're trying to engage in much more so from kind of the grassroots ground level versus us having to try to come up with those great insights on our own. We've done that a couple of times, and it's been pretty effective. And it's also you know, without having to invest hundreds of 1000s of dollars in research, sometimes more of a qualitative way that you can have the right level of thinking and that sensitivity on the marketing team itself.