Purpose-driven storytelling is vital for an award-winning campaign

There’s still time to enter CIPR Excellence Awards 2025. This week we hear from the winner of not one but two of last year's prestigious PR campaign categories.

By Bethan Davies

Every so often, you get to work on something that not only makes an impact for its audience but also impacts the work you do as an agency. For ‘Cause, the Dispose with Dignity campaign, which we worked on with phs Group in partnership with Prostate Cancer UK (PCUK), has been one of those campaigns.

Winning two CIPR Excellence Awards last year, best B2B campaign and best publication, gave us recognition as a team but was also a huge testament to the importance of delivering a campaign with purpose.

The campaign: making a real difference

For the 475,000 men living with or after prostate cancer in the UK, most will experience urinary incontinence as a side effect of treatment, many for the rest of their lives. Yet this subject is rarely spoken about. Even rarer, are facilities for men to dispose of incontinence products in public, which is causing stress, isolation, and shame.

We worked with phs Group and PCUK to address this issue, creating the Dispose with Dignity campaign to raise awareness of the topic and to encourage real-world action. In short, we needed to get bins into toilets so men could dispose of their urinary incontinence products with dignity.

We created a white paper with in-depth research, which revealed that one in eight men of all ages will experience urinary incontinence, a figure far higher than previously estimated. We also spoke to 10 case studies - real men experiencing incontinence - to ensure human stories were at the centre of our publication and our campaign.

Through this combination of case studies and new data, we launched the Dispose with Dignity campaign. We secured 159 media pieces, reaching an audience of over 85 million people.

Beyond media coverage, the campaign produced real-world impact. By the campaign’s early stages, 7,000 bins had been installed across the UK, and more than 450 people completed the Risk Checker tool on the PCUK website, with 193 being high-risk individuals, potentially saving lives.

We also got over 2,600 letters written to MPs. This prompted progress toward legislative change, with the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) committing to consult on changing regulations.

The campaign’s ongoing success

Since its launch, the campaign has gone from strength to strength. Not only have a further 11,000 bins been installed, but just this month we’ve received the news that the HSE consultation will be launching imminently. This means that soon we hope it will be a requirement for sanitary bins for men to be in place in washrooms.

The campaign has also continued to evolve. This year we launched Back in the Game, putting even more bins in situ. We partnered with Manchester United as the first football club to install bins in their stadiums, which has encouraged more clubs to come forward and do the same.

What makes an award-winning campaign?

An award-winning campaign has to have real world impact – and often that impact isn’t rooted in the big shiny creative activation– it’s rooted in the elements that work the hardest for a campaign. Tools like data that truly serves a purpose – insights that haven’t been asked for before and human stories, these are the elements that you can use time and time again in multiple settings throughout organisations, beyond what lands in the media.

At its core, the campaign’s success was in its authentic, empathetic storytelling which we shared through our case studies, giving a voice to men who had previously been unheard. Combined with our research-driven approach and new data developed with a trusted charity, we ensured what we had was compelling for media, but beyond that - was robust enough to be referenced in parliament, at events, in sales calls and conferences.

As an impact agency, we seek out issues that need championing and find a way to get them seen, heard and felt. Our approach to this campaign reflects our agency’s commitment to making a real impact, not just for clients but for the communities they serve.

The impact of the awards on our agency

Winning the CIPR Excellence Awards has also been important in positioning our agency for future success. We were able to use these awards as evidence submitted in other entries, which saw us win our first agency award: Best Small Agency at CIPR Cymru after just two years in business. It was also part of the submission for the Great British Businesswoman Awards, where I was recently awarded Role Model of the Year (SME), thanks to a nomination from a very supportive client.

Winning the CIPR Excellence Awards for the Dispose with Dignity campaign was a powerful reminder of the importance of meaningful work, work that not only delivers results for clients but also makes a difference in people's lives.

Bethan Davies is the founder of 'Cause.

The CIPR Excellence Awards