The picture of MS being painted by pharma, adverts of people climbing mountains and content driven by lifestyle tips, was of a condition you coped with

The community told a different story, often it was everyday activities that cause the biggest problems. What if you’re a marathon runner, but can’t put on your socks? Or a model who can’t apply mascara?

We had to do more, take on these challenges and create tangible solutions

This was achieved through 3 phases:

Challenges – ask the community which everyday challenges caused them the most difficulty

Ideas – engage the world to submit solutions

Development – get the community to choose their winning solution to be brought to life with a €100,000 grant

We worked with 3 key partners – MS Ireland, WIRED and Entrepreneurial Spark whose expertise helped shape each phase of the campaign

Across social media, we opened-up ongoing conversations with the MS community – supporting them through the issues they wanted to talk about and encouraging them to collaborate by sharing daily challenges

Working with our steering committee and social influencers, our understanding of their needs grew, allowing us to tailor our support

Innovators were activated online to submit ideas and through our partners and supporting events, which allowed individuals to come together to ideate

We created real, unfiltered content working with bloggers to demonstrate the real problems and solutions to managing MS. This meant it was truly content for the community by the community

All this was supplemented by community management allowing us to respond to engagements with speed and authenticity unheard of from a pharma campaign

Throughout the campaign, our social following increased 2,000%, we achieved 77% share of voice, and 25,000,000 social impressions over 3,600 published posts. To date we’ve had over 1.8 million social engagements; an unprecedented level of interaction with the MS community

Most importantly, the BladdeRunner app is now in development, demonstrating long term value to the community by addressing the needs of those with bladder issues – a problem affecting 80% of MS patients

We participate in daily conversations with patients, providing near real-time support, helping them navigate the overwhelming discourse online

We continue delivering meaningful solutions through ongoing insight development

In a recent poll, we discovered 67% of MSers have never discussed brain health with their neurologist, a challenge we tackled by creating the official brain emoji

Through TWvsMS we’ve successfully repositioned Sanofi Genzyme at the forefront of MS patient support, revolutionizing pharma’s approach with a global platform for change

The MS community is extremely active online and to bolster Sanofi Genzyme’s reputation, we needed to engage with and on-board this audience

Our strategy was ambitious – to create one centralized campaign, run by a European team and promoted by local markets. Focused around 5 key channels we built an ecosystem that would allow us to:

1) Grow our following through demonstrating commitment

2) Engage our audience and social influencers through near real-time responding

3) Create tangible solutions for problems that impact people living with MS

We created different groups of contributors and collaborators to help shape the campaign:

Steering committee: patients and experts contributed to the launch of the campaign by sharing their daily challenges to drive community participation

Bloggers: developing user-generated content sharing personal experiences, challenges and engaging their followers

Innovators: provided tangible solution with the aim of driving long term value to the MS community

Multiple Sclerosis is an incurable and degenerative neurological condition affecting 2.5 million people

MS is commonly diagnosed in a person’s twenties and thirties and as a chronic, progressive condition, they face a life of ever-increasing disability

MS presents itself differently in everyone, with a multitude of unpredictable symptoms that can turn everyday tasks into every day challenges, living a ‘normal’ life, is near impossible for many

Sanofi Genzyme approached us with 2 objectives:

1) Generate greater awareness of Sanofi Genzyme in MS

2) Demonstrate their support to people living with the condition

With more than 17 MS treatments being marketed by numerous pharmaceutical companies, and hundreds of MS patient organizations, it was clear that many patients were being overwhelmed by the volume of information on offer

The key challenge for Sanofi Genzyme was how to cut through this, and provide a truly differentiated and fundamentally useful patient support offering