Modular Messaging: Co-Designing Awareness
Aligning the Irish Cancer Society on core messaging and principles of awareness and prevention, through collaborative workshops.
Co-design prototyping
Overview
The Cancer Awareness Team delivers informational presentations to community and corporate audiences on topics such as; men’s health, women’s health, skin cancer etc. The project focused on reviewing and enhancing online presentations for corporate attendees to drive greater impact, engagement, and behaviour change.
Problem
Current presentations achieve high satisfaction rates but have evolved organically, resulting in inconsistent messaging and limited adaptability, falling short of both audience needs for deeper engagement and presenter needs for flexible, maintainable materials.
Solution
Shared consensus on core messaging was crystallised into a modular presentation format, five agreed design principles and presentation guidelines that act as a living reference for future work. This resulted in reduced, more focused presentation slides and shorter presentation times.
Goal
To create more impactful presentations and find meaningful ways to deliver key messaging that maximises learning and leads to behaviour change amongst attendees.
Constraints
Tight time constraints required a pivot to a more realistic scope, fully developing one exemplar presentation for corporate attendees to serve as a template for others.
Research
To understand the team, their users, the organisation, and the wider ecosystem, research included the following methods:
Journey map
Channel audit
Touchpoint inventory
Stakeholder map
Current state blueprint
Stakeholder interviews
Presentation audit
Survey analysis (407 responses)
Competitor analysis
Observation/shadowing
Research methods
Service users
Analysis of 407 survey responses showed most attendees are female-identified, aged 30–50, with a 64% indicative score for behaviour change. Many reported presentations as too long and information-heavy, with requests for guidance for those outside standard screening age groups.
Key insights
Knowledge gaps
Knowledge gaps around screening eligibility.
Too long
Presentations average 30 slides and consistently run for almost an hour.
Misinformation
Widespread misinformation and fear within users' ecosystems of influence.
External barriers
High petrol costs and long waiting lists reducing screening uptake.
Psychological barriers
Users report feeling fearful of cancer with poor risk awareness.
Aligned messaging and more engaging presentations will lead to better knowledge recall and behaviour change. A modular, adaptable format will allow the team to present flexibly without diluting their core message.
Co-design workshops
Empathy mapping and persona
Empathy map - attendees
Persona
Core and supporting messaging
Core and supporting messaging: breast cancer
Behaviour change and design principles
Design principles
Key insights
Difficulty choosing
The team struggled to commit to a single key message.
Fear of divergence
Some repetition in responses suggested reluctance to diverge from the group.
Interactivity
A clear appetite for interactivity and more engaging elements emerged.
Humour
Humour was identified as a powerful and underused tool for carrying health messaging.
Using the 5 Whys and a How Might We question - how might we instill greater awareness of cancer risks so people take action? - three ideas were generated. Through discussion and prioritisation, a modular format of essential core slides and flexible topic-specific slides was selected for development and testing.
Ideation
Prioritisation
Modular framework
Prototyping
A paper presentation prototype was created with simple sketches of proposed interactive elements. A consensus was reached on a format of 10 core slides, up to 10 topic slides and to include at least one interactive element. The Cancer Awareness manager compiled the prototype, which was reviewed by the team.
Low-fidelity modular prototye: core + topic + interactive element
User testing
A 30-minute online test was conducted with 4 participants, 3 team members and 1 presenter. The session included 11 core slides with a choice of questions as the interactive element, completing in just over 18 minutes.
