Creation of a poster to raise awareness about bladder cancer signs and symptoms in France

Lori Cirefice Board of Directors for the World Bladder Cancer Patient Coalition, and Patient Coalition Delegate with Cancer Vessie France – Les Zuros shares the development of an awareness poster about the sign and symptoms of bladder cancer:

In May 2019, Association Les Zuros developed an awareness poster about the signs and symptoms of bladder cancer, considering the surprising lack of awareness around bladder cancer compared to other common cancers in France.

Members volunteered to help develop the poster, and a small working group was created to manage the development and drafting of the awareness poster. Feedback was received on drafts from the larger membership, and once we had a final version, we also sense checked the content with our supporting urologists to ensure that our poster was scientifically sound.

We learned some interesting things along the way that may be helpful to other groups. First, we found out that it is not an easy task to manage photo rights, and we paid for the use of several images that we included on the poster (even the blood splatters!), but the payments were based on the number of printed copies and impressions we would get on the poster, and at that point in our poster development we had no idea how many we would print. The whole process was much more time-consuming and complicated than we anticipated.

Second, we also contacted different municipalities in France asking them to display our poster, either on their municipal website, or their municipal digital information boards. We were delighted to receive so many positive replies; however, it turned out that each municipality needed a different format of the poster, which ended up being very time-consuming for our volunteers to create. We also hadn’t set aside any budget to buy shipping supplies and postage to send paper copies across the country, so in the end, the costs greatly surpassed our available funds for the project.

Going forward, we will reuse this poster for our 2020 campaign, and we will know how to manage the budget much better this time. In hindsight, we would have started our project earlier, and better defined the budget and goals upfront.

You can find more information about Cancer Vessie France – Les Zuros here 

Explore and get inspired by more stories and examples like this one in our Start-up guide for bladder cancer patient groups.