Active

One of Canada’s leading independent schools was still recovering from a past media crisis, and the school was committed to better planning for the future. The school enrolled Curious Public to equip its senior administration with issues management training and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) best practices. Their request was to create a customized training series to give the school’s senior staff the skills to assess and improve their current DEIB framework, issues management processes, and media response plan.

We paired with our partners at Denise O’Neil Green Consulting, a world-renowned diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy, to help us create the custom training series. First, we assessed the landscape of all other Canadian independent schools’ traditional and social media coverage, DEIB work, and any public responses given to the media during crises. We then crafted training materials that directly focused on communication with Gen Z, independent school-specific DEIB communications opportunities and challenges, and issues management best practices. The training was complete with fictionalized scenarios of increased media intensity for which staff had limited time to produce a concise communications response plan. Our media relations experts then evaluated response plans.

The training series gave the school’s staff a safe space to discuss sensitive DEIB issues and unpack their own experience of past conflicts. As a result of the training, our client was able to build an issues management process amongst senior staff and outline the school’s future media response plan.

The Regional Municipality of Durham forms the east end of the Greater Toronto Area and part of the Golden Horseshoe. Durham region consists of eight municipalities and a total population of 683,600 and growing. Its communities are diversifying with more businesses and young families flocking to the area. The Municipality enlisted Curious Public to help revitalize the region’s communications to improve engagement and reflect Durham’s unique features, growing communities and business centres. They also asked us to evaluate the Corporate Communications department’s organizational structure and make recommendations to eliminate inefficiencies and maximize strengths.

We reviewed Durham’s internal and external communications and marketing material. We also interviewed all communications staff and leaders to get a panoramic view of how communications teams worked and the Municipality’s current messaging. From those insights, we created a new Master Narrative that positioned Durham as a desirable place to live, work, do business, and raise a family. The narrative became a home base for all messaging and communications products. 

Using the narrative, Durham’s communications teams could ensure consistent and comprehensive messaging to express the Municipality’s unique value proposition in order to attract and encourage new businesses and sources of revenue to the area. 

We then evaluated Durham’s Corporate Communications organizational structure, responsibilities, and the process of how communications and marketing products were created. We compared our discoveries against a thorough competitive analysis of comparable regions’ communications content and organizational structures. 

We created a final report for the Region of Durham to showcase the current strengths within the department and recommended growth and efficiency opportunities to implement. Our report also included suggested organizational structure and job descriptions for new roles.

Curious Public planned and delivered the Municipality of Durham Region’s Master Narrative and Communications Review in 90 days. Corporate Communications (renamed “Communications Office” through our process) had a new Regional narrative in place, a new team structure, and a message track to execution.

The Municipality’s Master Narrative was also acknowledged with a MarCom Platinum award for quality and excellence.

Our client’s company was born of a desire to solve a problem. The startup brought innovation to breast cancer diagnosis by creating a device that makes tumour localization easier and more comfortable for patients. Our client engaged Curious Public alongside its PR/Marketing team to help develop a brand awareness campaign for its device and create a thought leadership platform to position the company as a champion for increased high-quality care for breast cancer patients. 

We conducted in-depth interviews with our client’s team, researched the company’s past marketing and communications, and reviewed the larger competitive health care technology landscape. We created a brand narrative which would act as an internal story guide for all communications products to flow from. We also created a strategic communications plan to get our client on the radars of hospitals and surgeons in the crowded market and in the world of journals and academia. Our communications strategy included a focused and targeted roadmap of tactics and activities to highlight our client’s product and bring the company into important conversations about breast cancer patients and current treatments. A schedule of articles for relevant journals and websites, regular social media posts, conference and speech opportunities, and rolling news releases to highlight product and sector issues were also key aspects of the strategy. 

We continue to support our client with ongoing strategy and communications products such as articles and blog posts on timely issues within women’s health and health care technology. Curious Public also writes speeches and news releases to support our client’s ongoing activities in the thought leadership space.

Women’s College Hospital (WCH) approached Curious Public to help them develop and launch a new research and knowledge centre focusing on women’s aging. WCH wanted the new centre to be more than science and put research into action to generate knowledge and raise awareness in the broader community about the unique health and societal issues facing women aged 50+ . Our role was to clarify the institute’s scope, goals and objectives, create a core narrative for the centre, and advise on strategic initiatives to launch the institute.

We collaborated with the team’s policy consultant to develop the institute’s strategic direction and research focus. From our collaboration, we created a  “manifesto” for the institute that outlined its goals, objectives, and initial activities to help focus the WCH planning team and generate buy-in. This was doubly important as the WCH team  prepared for future fundraising from the larger WCH community. The document also led to the institute’s title, Women’s Age Lab. 

We then held in-depth interviews with the Lab’s planning team, the hospital’s senior leaders, and outside experts to understand the institution’s goals, needs, and potential impact. Our insights from these interviews became the basis for the institute’s core narrative. The narrative zeroed in on the core issue that older women’s health has been consistently overlooked by the healthcare community and general public — from research to treatment options and access to health services and social programs.  

WCH launched the Women’s Age Lab — the first and only of its kind — in 2021. The Lab’s mission is to address the imbalance in women’s health by supporting the healthy aging of women and reimagining a system and society where older women and their distinct well-being and health needs are recognized and addressed. 

The narrative we created drove the tone and themes of all subsequent communications about the Lab, informed our copywriting for the initial splash page and current website, and our detailed communications and social media strategy used for the launch. 

Since its launch, national and global publications, including Forbes magazine, have prominently featured the Women’s Age Lab.