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Entry deadline 14th March 2025
Extended entry deadline: 21st March 2025, additional fee applies
Judging days 8th, 9th and 23rd May 2025
Awards Ceremony 3rd July 2025

Welcome to the Communiqué Awards

For the 2024 Communiqué Awards, we invited you to take us out of our comfort zone and show us your bravest, boldest most progressive work. You did not disappoint. As our tenure as Co-Chairs enters its second year, we’ve reflected on why this kind of work is important, necessary even, to a thriving health and medical communications industry. We’ve asked ourselves: why is it important to show the impact of bravery?

In a world where healthcare challenges continue to evolve, the role of health communications has never been more critical — or more inspiring. The pharmaceutical industry is navigating a dynamic landscape shaped by technological advancements, heightened geo-political challenges, and an ever-growing emphasis on transparency and accountability. In this environment, effective communication is not just a function but a strategic necessity.

The Communiqué Awards celebrate excellence in health communications, providing a vital platform to showcase the groundbreaking work shaping our industry. While creativity and strategic execution are essential, true excellence is defined by our work’s tangible impact — shifting perceptions, influencing behaviours, and driving meaningful organisational change. Measuring and demonstrating these outcomes has long been the gold standard for award-winning entries. However, as the landscape evolves, so must our approach. How can we better define, measure, and articulate impact in today’s complex world? This challenge remains at the heart of what we do, inspiring us to push the boundaries of effectiveness and value in health communications.

The concept of impact in health communications goes beyond deliverables and outputs. It encompasses perceptual shifts, behaviour change and organisational value. Impact is what bridges the gap between well-executed campaigns and transformative, measurable value.

Celebrating impact in health communications is not just about awarding creativity but about underscoring accountability. It’s a reminder of the importance of defining success clearly, measuring outcomes rigorously, and sharing insights transparently. As we champion the achievements of individuals and teams across the industry, these awards also challenge us to push boundaries and ensure that every campaign, strategy, and message is designed with impact in mind.

Ultimately, the recognition of excellence through a Communiqué Award is about more than trophies — it’s about inspiring progress. By showcasing work that delivers measurable results, and also being transparent about our learnings, we foster a culture of continuous improvement.

The idea of continuous improvement has always been important to the Communiqué Awards. The Awards will always evolve to keep pace with changes in the industry and feedback from its stakeholders. Following the introduction of one new and updates to three other categories last year, this year, we are pleased to introduce some further changes in consultation with the Steering Committee and members of the judging panel.

  • Acknowledging that consultancy categories haven’t been updated for a while, we have now included some new criteria to ensure marketplace needs assessment, proposition development and how impact was delivered through client work can be assessed.
  • We have reviewed the language used in what was the Multichannel category and the two Digital and Social Media categories.
    • Recognising the short-comings of ‘multichannel’ or ‘omnichannel’ we have evolved the category to be clear on what we are looking to recognise: an insight-driven approach to using different channels, carefully linked together, to engage audiences and create impact. This will include earned, paid and owned content and channels.
    • The Excellence in Engagement Through Social Media/Digital Channels is now focused on social media. The decision was taken to focus on this channel, as digital solutions are seen throughout other categories. The Excellence in Engagement Through Social Media categories will recognise campaigns delivered predominantly through organic and paid social content and channels.

Brave work inspires team engagement, organisation recognition and often delivers strong outputs. Demonstrating transformational, high impact, results from that bravery will ensure health communications is recognised as a powerful tool for advancing patient care and driving meaningful change for all stakeholders.

It is a privilege to see how the work being done across the industry is creating genuine impact and we cannot wait to spend time looking at this year’s entries.

Communiqué Awards Co-Chairs: Catherine Devaney, Founder, Curious Health and Neil Flash, Owner, Ignition Consulting

TESTIMONIALS

“The Communiqué Awards are rightly a highlight of the healthcare communications industry calendar, and the boost that a win gives to an agency and all its people is tremendous. Oxford PharmaGenesis celebrated our most successful year ever in 2020, despite the unique challenges of a global pandemic, and entering the awards in 2021 felt a natural way to thank everyone for their commitment and dedication. As a company with a broad Medical Affairs focus, we’ve been delighted to see the Communiqué Awards evolve in recent years to include a wider range of more medical-oriented categories. This very much reflects the growth in prominence of Medical Affairs in the pharma industry, and the updated category of Medical Affairs Agency of the Year seemed like an exciting opportunity to showcase the work Oxford PharmaGenesis has been doing in this area.”

– Richard White, Chief Operating Officer, Oxford PharmaGenesis

“We are honoured and delighted to have won Communique’s inaugural Leadership Award for Action on Workforce Diversity and Inclusion. We have worked hard, top down and bottom up, to make a meaningful difference – we’ve tried to embed diversity, equity and inclusion across all aspects of our business, not just internally but also externally in our client and community outreach. It’s a huge privilege for our whole team to have our efforts recognised in this way. We recognise that we are still on a learning journey and we will continue to endeavour to do the best we can to make sure that D&I is in our DNA, both individually and collectively at IPG Health Medical Communications.”

– Caroline Smith, Executive Director, Talent

“We’re beyond proud to have won the inaugural Communiqué award for Agility and Flexibility. It recognises and celebrates the hard work of a group of dedicated collaborators, who were determined to support patients during the first wave of COVID-19. The high quality of all the finalists’ work and the rigor of the judging process make it all the more significant. It’s a source of great pride, joy and motivation for all the Dovetail team and our wonderful clients.”

– Claire Munro, Owner, Dovetail Strategies

“We were delighted to win two awards at the Communiqué Awards 2021, in the categories of Best Use of Data Visualisation and Charitable Campaign of the Year. After what has been a challenging time for the entire charity sector, we are very proud that our innovative work has been recognised at such a prestigious event. 2021 saw the World Health Organization launch their Global Road Map to defeat meningitis. As one of the wide range of stakeholders who participated in its development, it’s very rewarding to have recognition from the charity sector on our role. Thank you for your support.”

– Liz Rodgers, Research Project Manager, Meningitis Research Foundation

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