The brief

UK-Med, a charity deploying medics to global regions in humanitarian crisis, is saving lives in Gaza. Highly skilled NHS surgeons are working in UK-Med’s sophisticated mobile field hospitals to assist those caught in the crossfire of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Reliant on grants and donations, UK-Med must remain visible and take every opportunity to boost its profile. That’s why MIH was enlisted to help publicise the charity and its critical work in Gaza by spearheading a local and national media campaign.

What we did

Understanding the client

Before being able to draft any content or approach any media outlets, we needed to define UK-Med’s key messages to be able to shape our tactics accordingly. We set up meetings with members of the charity’s leadership team to get a feel for its values and define clear boundaries for our work. It quickly became apparent that the utmost care would have to be taken to ensure we stayed in line with UK-Med’s apolitical stance and strict security requirements.

It was vital that UK-Med maintained complete impartiality to avoid alienating potential sources of support, allowing it to remain a balanced voice of authority and ensure field workers’ safety on the ground. Without that credibility, media outlets could soon lose trust that information provided in interviews and press releases was free from bias or political agenda.

We resolved that every measure would be taken to ensure UK-Med was defined purely by its mission to save lives. MIH supported the charity in crafting and refining its narrative further, to ensure clarity of messaging across all channels throughout the campaign.

Crucially, any information disseminated would have to be very carefully managed for security reasons. Conveying the wrong messaging or accidentally leaking confidential information – such as personal identities and field locations – could endanger those working for and with UK-Med.

Creating content

We held regular briefings with UK-Med to establish what was happening on the ground and capture its plans to step up the campaign in Gaza. Equipped with the latest information and having agreed a content sign-off process with the charity’s key players, we set about planning media content and interview opportunities for a bespoke list of media contacts.

A detailed press release about the measures UK-Med was taking to scale up its work – including the deployment of a new state-of-the-art field hospital – was crafted by MIH’s team of experienced communications professionals. It featured high-impact quotes and information gathered from interviews with UK-Med aid workers, many of who had been delivering aid in the warzone.

Further ‘case study’ interviews were held with medics working in Gaza’s under-pressure hospitals, capturing powerful first-hand accounts of the desperate conditions they had experienced.

Pitching to the media

MIH made use of its extensive list of contacts at some of the UK’s biggest media outlets, liaising with journalists to generate interest in the UK-Med story. We also pitched interview opportunities to national and local TV and radio stations in a bid to spread the word more widely and help boost the charity’s profile.

We reported back regularly to key UK-Med stakeholders at checkpoint meetings, keeping them informed of progress and acting as an external ‘press office’ for the charity when subsequent enquiries from journalists came in. We kept a log of all coverage secured and were careful to ensure accuracy and impartiality in all instances.

The result

Broadcast interviews with UK-Med’s frontline team were lined up with outlets including BBC News and Channel 4. News articles featuring interviews with UK-Med officials were published on websites including BBC News. MIH laid the groundwork for subsequent articles that appeared on the Sky News website, with the Mail Online also picking up the story about the field hospital.

At a more local level, content based on MIH’s interviews with the volunteer surgeons working with UK-Med in Gaza appeared in several regional news publications, whose patch covered the UK hospitals where these volunteers were normally based. This, in turn, helped to promote the NHS organisations supporting UK-Med’s important work.

UK-Med fed back its appreciation for the work MIH had carried out, praising our ‘hands-on media relations support’ during an extremely challenging time.

 

“MIH provided strategic and hands-on media relations support for us during a high-profile and high-risk time for our charity. They immediately understood the sensitivities of the difficult environment and context we were operating in. Their professional and organised approach to the project was extremely valuable, as was their ability to hit the ground running. They were always responsive and kept me updated, which was of huge value during a peak time for us.”

– Jackie Snell, then Director of Fundraising and Communications, UK-Med

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