The challenge
Proton Therapy UK is the British arm of the Proton Therapy Center in Prague, which has offered proton beam therapy, a precise form of radiotherapy, to UK patients since 2012.
The brief was twofold: make a little-known therapy comprehensible to a British audience, and build enough trust in the centre's oncologists that a family facing a diagnosis would consider travelling abroad for care.
Our approach
Since 2016 we have kept the centre in the UK news cycle week in, week out. Whenever cancer makes headlines, through a public figure's diagnosis, new research or an awareness month, journalists know its oncologists will give them clear, quotable answers, which has put them in titles from The Sun to the i Paper on subjects well beyond proton therapy itself.
The people who travelled to Prague tell the story best: a mother determined to see her son grow up, a retired Norfolk businessman who flew 600 miles for treatment. Their accounts, in their own words, explain the therapy more powerfully than any clinical description.
Digital PR gives the coverage a second job. Each editorial link from a major news site adds to the website's standing in search, so families researching the treatment are more likely to find the centre.
The outcome
Ten years in, marco/richards' work for Proton Therapy UK stands at 1,042 pieces of coverage, 497 of them carrying links, from publications with an average Domain Authority of 75.
That coverage has reached a combined audience of two billion since 2016, spanning national newspapers, broadcast and regional titles across the UK and Ireland, and the programme is still running.
Most importantly, when families look into proton beam therapy today, they find a centre whose specialists they have already been reading for years. Its managing director credits our work with reaching patients around the world who might never have known proton beam therapy was an option.
