Zakłady Farmaceutyczne Polpharma SA - Issues Management Campaign of the Year

Company: Zakłady Farmaceutyczne Polpharma SA, Starogard Gdański, Poland
Company Division/Group: Polpharma
Company Description: Polpharma, founded in 1935, is Poland’s largest pharmaceutical company.We produce an extensive range of drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients, which compete successfully in the EU and the US markets.We also operate in Central and Eastern Europe,the Caucasus and Central Asia.Polpharma’s products are available in 50 countries.Our activities are appreciated by patient,medical and business communities.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Issues Management

Nomination Title: EcoVisit – together for a good climate

Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched: September 2020

What can you do, when your most efficient, large-scale promotion tool gets suspended overnight? How can you activate reluctant partners to communicate online and motivate your own team to switch to new, unknown tools and at the same time protect the environment? Polpharma has found a solution combining business priorities, ecology and relations management. But let’s start from the beginning.

Polpharma as Poland’s largest pharmaceutical company has wide portfolio of prescription drugs. As they cannot be promoted to public, we concentrate on promotion to healthcare professionals. The most efficient tool in this type of promotion are personal visits conducted by sales representatives.

However, the pandemic prevented us from performing the visits practically overnight. Switching to online visits turned out to be harder than expected, even though we designed an intuitive, efficient digital tool. Most doctors simply didn’t like remote visits that became part of their everyday life. For one thing, they didn’t feel comfortable using the technology. Moreover, they missed the upside of direct visits – relation with the representative and the company. Finding another 5 minutes for a video visit seemed to be much more difficult than chatting with the representative in person. But not only the doctors were reluctant to use the new tool – our representatives also felt it was not as engaging as real visits. They bumped against digitally fatigued, uncooperative doctors and got even more demotivated. The perfect answer turned out to be ‘EcoVisits’ – an initiative that got naturally imprinted into Polpharma’s DNA.

We wanted to

encourage doctors to perform remote visits with our representatives
motivate representatives to successfully switch to this form of promotion
strengthen doctor/representative relations and enhance efficient marketing communication

To achieve this, we decided to give both groups technological support and an engaging common goal. That’s how we designed EcoVisits, fitting perfectly into Polpharma’s eco-philosophy.

Every remote visit longer than 5minutes becomes an EcoVisit and is turned into 1m2 of biodiverse forest Polpharma will plant with the doctors and Las na Zawsze (Forest forever) organization. These forests will never be cut down as the ground is secured against logging. Every EcoVisit reduces CO2 emission, as the representative’s car stays in garage – 100 EcoVisits equal 250kg CO2 less in the atmosphere! Another upside is limiting paper consumption as all materials are digital.

We organized technical trainings and workshops on environmental issues for our representatives. We equipped them with materials they could use in contact with doctors – website www.ekowizyta.pl , MMS, digital leaflets, animations, presentations and mailings.

The webpage includes information on the project, facts about forests/ecology, competitions, interviews and videos. Logged in doctors can take part in EcoVisits with Polpharma representatives, check, how many m2 of forest will be planted thanks to each of them or add their photos to a forest gallery.

Now doctors, by performing a visit with Polpharma’s representative, not only learn about our medicines, but also contribute to climate care.

-We educated nearly 1000 Polpharma Sales&Marketing Employees and 30,000 doctors on forest protection and ecology issues during dedicated online workshops.
-The www.ekowizyta.pl website, aimed at the narrow specialist group of doctors, has an impressive number of 48000 UU and the average time spent there is 5min 53s.
-Since we launched the project in September 2020, nearly 62,000 EcoVisits have been conducted. Nearly 800 Polpharma sales representatives engaged in the project and so did 28,000 doctors – over70% of all doctors in our sales target!
-By performing the 62k EcoVisits, we limited the CO2 emission by 155 tons.
-We have already planted 4 forests (over 3ha.) with over 6,000 trees and next planting actions are planned for autumn. We used mainly young seedlings of sessile oak, maple, ash, sorbus, hornbeam and bushes of spindle and alder buckthorn. When our first 4 forests grow, they will consume about 21 tons of CO2 yearly and produce about 2 tons of oxygen every day, which covers daily demand on oxygen for 7,500 people!
-Over 530 reports on the project were published in Polish media

That is how we successfully brought to live a program based on 5 e-pillars: education (digital and ecological), ecology (compliant with world trend of being climate neutral), emission (less CO2, more oxygen), engagement (even without traditional, face-to-face visits) and emotion (we gave doctors opportunity to do something good, which is a need imprinted in every one of us).

1. EcoVisit_promotional animation
An animation designed to present the project to its target groups, encourage them to take part in the project and make them aware of ecological issues they have impact on. It shows, how both our professional groups are part of the environmental ecosystem and how 5minutes of EcoVisit can support protecting the climate.The animation is published on the official ekowizyta.pl website and was additionally promoted via MMS and e-mailings to doctors.

2. EcoVisit_promotional summary
A short summary of the project up to date, showing the scale of its impact on the environment achieved along with our partners - doctors and pharmacists. It will be presented during medical conferences and by our representatives during visits, EcoVisits!