03 March 2023
By Finland
Psoriasis: A whole body disease
Our World Psoriasis Day 2022 campaign focused on psoriatic disease as a disease for the whole body. Our campaigns from 2019 to 2021 had a focus on mental health issues and psoriasis. We found that having essentially the same theme for three consecutive years helped us broaden our scope and take up a lot of different views on the issue. Keeping this in mind, we decided to open up the theme even more and talk about not only mental health but also other themes connected with psoriasis. We emphasized the fact that psoriasis sufferers need information on their disease, as there are a lot of other phenomena connected with psoriasis. All of these can be treated or managed, some even prevented – but this requires that the person with psoriasis has knowledge on how their disease may affect daily life.
Our WPD campaign had a record of ten sponsors: Abbvie, Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Janssen Finland, LEO Pharma, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer and UCB Pharma. This allowed us to produce good quality activities and outsource e.g. media pitching.
Activities and events
Our main WPD activity was a series of four webinars on topics close to psoriasis:
The webinars were sent live from a studio on the 20th, 24th, 26th and 29th of October respectively and recorded (see recordings on our web site). Technical producing was done by Stremia, and our part was finding the right speakers, briefing them and advertising the webinars. Our increased budget allowed us to reach out to the best experts. For example, Patrik Borg is one of the best-known nutrition specialists in the country and attracted a lot of attention.
Our live broadcasts had a total of 498 views and the recordings have been viewed 483 times by December 9th 2022. The broadcasts and their recordings were also watched in different events organised by local psoriasis associations.
We organised a social media campaign advertising the webinars and their topics during October 2022. We had a total reach of 24 150 in Facebook and Instagram. Twitter and LinkedIn were also used.
We also organised a World Psoriasis Day event at the Finnish Parliament on Friday October 28th, where we had a chance to talk about psoriasis issues with 10 Members of Parliament and several parliament assistants.
Local psoriasis associations organised a total of 20 events on or around World Psoriasis Day, in Helsinki, Hyvinkää, Hämeenlinna, Joensuu, Jyväskylä, Kouvola, Kuopio, Lahti, Porvoo, Ruovesi, Salo, Seinäjoki, Tampere, Tornio, Turku, Tuusula and Vaasa.
We sent a WPD press release and outsourced media pitching to a communications agency, which resulted in an article about psoriasis and sexuality in Iltalehti, the country’s most read news web site. Satakunnan Kansa also published our opinion piece signed by our executive director Sonja Bäckman and Member of Parliament and chair of the parliamentary interest group on psoriasis, Heidi Viljanen.
We felt that the campaign theme was necessary and we were, and still are, able to offer a lot of information to psoriasis sufferers. The webinars had a lot of viewers and were well executed. The speakers also got a lot of positive feedback for their expertise. The number of local events increased to a good level after a few quieter years during Covid restrictions. Our theme needs to be worked on and talked about more; to an average social media follower or member it probably isn’t as straighforward as our former mental health theme.
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