LONDON: For the public and charity sectors, marketers can increase the long-term effects of a campaign by aligning with the expertise, exposure or the fame of a partner, an industry figure argues.

Writing in the current issue of Admap, Charlie Snow, the outgoing chief strategy officer at MullenLowe, maintains that long-term social effects can be achieved only by working together with stakeholders as well as external experts and businesses.

"Stakeholder partners," Snow says, "can lend credibility, but also provide specialist knowledge, valuable infrastructure and scale through their support."

The Stroke Association's expertise revealed a powerful piece of knowledge from the paramedic's handbook, the simple 'F.A.S.T.' acronym, to help people spot the early symptoms of a stroke.

The campaign, Snow writes, has proven to be one of the most effective health campaigns ever, now entering its eighth year on the UK's screens.

Elsewhere, he contends that a strong partnership with media can "help sharpen the message in a deeply personal way".

For instance, one of the barriers faced by the British Heart Foundation is the public's reluctance to believe that heart disease can happen to them personally.

In response, he says, the Foundation "used different media vehicles to have a direct personal conversation, to make people realise it could quite easily happen to them right here, right now – we have used cross-track posters, tube panels, coffee cups".

In addition to gaining exposure, influencers can provide a powerful – and cheap – way to amplify the message. This requires finding the people that the target audience most admire, what they talk about, and how they communicate.

Marketing the public and social sector requires innovative media and inventive methods of communication to sharpen and personalise the message, says Snow.

For stakeholder partnerships, he concludes, expertise and credibility are fundamental to the decision, but here marketers can also leverage existing stakeholder infrastructure that can then be magnified.

Data sourced from Admap