BCRM: PR campaign

The brief

The Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine (BCRM) is a private fertility clinic with world class facilities and technology that treats both private patients and NHS patients.  BCRM was the first clinic of its type in Bristol and remained so until 2012 but now faces competition from several other private fertility clinics, so at the beginning of 2020 the management team enlisted the support of Empica to boost BCRM’s profile.

Their most important target audience is the trying-to-conceive (TTC) community: it aims to be first choice in Bristol and the South West for fertility testing, treatment and advice. There is also benefit for them in their success stories being visible to other members of the fertility community, particularly those of a suitable calibre to join the clinic staff.

What we did

Since the clinic consistently achieves some of the highest success rates in the country for IVF, we agreed that the sharing of personalised individual success stories should form the heart of BCRM’s PR campaign. Here is a summary of one of those campaigns.

A Taunton-based IVF patient, Karen Marks, has given birth to three babies, each two years apart, thanks to treatment received at the clinic. Karen is an enthusiastic advocate of the clinic’s staff and their expertise and was very happy to raise awareness of what BCRM had achieved for her and her husband. 

Each of the Marks’s babies resulted from the same batch of frozen embryos, so we started off sharing news of the birth of the second baby in 2020 with the headline ‘Twins born two years apart,’ and followed it up in 2022 when baby number three was born with a ‘triplets’ story.

Media relations campaign

We were confident this strategy would attract a high degree of media attention, and it did. 

The ‘twins’ story resulted in local, regional, national and international coverage, in print (tabloid and broadsheet papers and a national women’s magazine), online and on broadcast media.

After the third baby arrived, Empica again sowed the seeds for an impressive media take-up, which resulted in even wider publicity for the story of Karen’s ‘miracle triplets’, BCRM’s role in creating the family, and how happy she and her husband had been with the support given to them by BCRM throughout their fertility journey.

The ‘triplets’ story also generated television coverage, with Karen and her husband being interviewed on the ITV evening news.

Outcomes

Media coverage following the 2020 and 2022 campaigns generated high levels of interest from the TTC community, with the stories being widely followed on social media. BCRM reported very positive reactions from patients, staff and other stakeholders to the media coverage they had seen and heard. 

Karen’s references to the excellence of care provided by BCRM came through loud and clear at each opportunity, and her enthusiastic endorsement of BCRM’s IVF programme – evidenced by the birth of her three babies – not only provided a boost for the clinic’s profile at the time, but also supplied a raft of material they can continue to use to endorse their services, on their website and in their wider marketing.

Testimonial

“We approached Empica because of Martin Powell’s long-standing association with Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby. Louise continues to attract international media interest decades after her birth thanks to Martin and Empica’s ongoing involvement. We also liked the down-to-earth and pragmatic approach that was evidently Empica’s hallmark.

“Covid put a halt to our clinical operations just a few weeks after we started working together, nevertheless Empica enabled us to maintain visibility during the challenging year that followed by helping to identify a wealth of media opportunities such as the Marks ‘twins’ story.

“Nicki Sampson, our PR manager, also identified opportunities for clinic spokespeople to comment on topical fertility issues and helped raise awareness of success stories and research work undertaken by our staff which were continuing to bear fruit, even during lockdown. Once we were able to resume our normal activities she liaised with the media to let our target audiences know about that too.

“Publicity for the official opening of BCRM’s state-of-the-art new clinic is the most recent project to have benefitted from Empica’s expertise, with a raft of great case study-driven advertorials in key regional media before the event, substantial editorial coverage after the event and great film coverage by Empica’s videographer, Grace Fox, to use on our website and as part of our education packages.

“A final word about Nicki: she is well-informed, full of productive ideas, very proactive, good at keeping us up to speed, and generally just a pleasure to work with. And from what she tells me these characteristics are true of her colleagues as well – Martin knows how to choose his team.”