PROOF Centre of Excellence

PROOF Centre of Excellence - Biomarker solutions for health care.

PROOF Centre of Excellence

Project Highlights

In its first year, we helped the PROOF Centre through its messaging and branding phase and developed a two-year communications strategy.

  • Materials included a website (www.proofcentre.ca), fact sheets and exhibitory. We also developed an inaugural annual report featuring custom illustration, which established a unique “look and feel” that distinguished the PROOF Centre from all other health research organizations.
  • As we enter the second year of their funding cycle, we are now developing a social media plan to allow the PROOF Centre to build partnerships and programs by targeting research and industry audiences.

Background

In 2008, the National Centres of Excellence named several new “Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research” (CECRs). One of the recipients was Dr. Bruce McManus and his team at UBC and St. Paul’s Hospital, who attracted $17 million in multi-year funding to found the Prevention of Organ Failure Centre of Excellence — the PROOF Centre. They called us to help them establish their branding, develop a comprehensive communications strategy and to provide ongoing consulting and support to their front-line team. Their goal was to communicate the purpose of the PROOF Centre to a variety of audiences and to use their branding and communications to attract partners and collaborators.

Approach

Our branding process, including “competitive landscape” research and a “Discovery Session,” helped uncover a series of challenges unique to the PROOF Centre and other complex research ventures. To target the group’s widely diverse audiences — researchers, business, and policy makers and health authorities — we created a tiered series of messaging that allowed them to communicate at the appropriate level with each audience. The visual brand was called to do “triple-duty” by resonating with all three audiences. It also needed to convey the humanity of this research venture and reflect its ultimate message: to improve the health of Canadians.