The VIVENSA FOUNDATION
This article has been updated to reflect the Vivensa Foundation’s current name, strapline and logo. Date modified: 12 February 2026.
THE CHALLENGE
Despite being the only UK research funder solely dedicated to ageing research the Vivensa Foundation (previously The Dunhill Medical Trust) was struggling to reach their target grantee audiences, resulting in applications that weren’t quite the right fit.
Following the release of their 2020 strategic funding framework, academic and clinical research communities and other key stakeholders needed to hear about the new priorities and themes.
Unsure why their content wasn’t landing – and with no in-house comms team to take the lead – the Vivensa Foundation asked us to help them take a strategic approach to comms.
OUR APPROACH
From 2020-2025 we worked closely with the Vivensa Foundation, effectively acting as an embedded comms team. We’ve produced high quality and rich content that consistently ties into their bigger research and social innovation goals, funded projects and funding calls. We’ve written 70+ award-holder stories, blogs, news items and event summaries, along with image carousels and audiograms to drive engagement on social media. Grantees and stakeholders regularly feed back how much they enjoy being interviewed by our team and feel at ease sharing their work.
We’ve also upskilled the Vivensa Foundation team in storytelling, writing and getting the most out of LinkedIn.
In 2023, the Vivensa Foundation leadership asked us to work with their Board of Trustees to champion the importance of strategic comms. This was followed by an in-depth strategy sprint, including an audit of their existing comms channels and detailed audience research through surveys, workshops, and stakeholder interviews.
We then ran a strategy workshop with the full Vivensa Foundation team to clearly articulate what’s most important to them as a research funder and ensure the whole organisation felt ownership of the emerging key messages.
Finally, we delivered a single strategy document capturing their big comms goals, each with measurable objectives, as well as audience personas and audience-specific key messages.
It also included a prioritised action and content plan, providing a clear and achievable path forward that matched the realities of their capacity and budget.
KEY RESULTS
Better decision making
Found the root cause of the comms problem
Audience insights informed strategies for content campaigns, newsletter, and social media
Able to make confident decisions around how to develop and expand their stakeholder network
offering made clear
Messaging around ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ now overt rather than covert
Consistent cadence of content and key messages across all comms channels
Continual generation of content ideas, including reusable evergreen and one-off timely stories
engaged audiences
100% increase in LinkedIn followers within the first six months post-strategy
Huge interest in first funding call post-strategy with over 200 people attending the funding call webinar
Funding expression of interest slots fully booked 4 weeks before the deadline
WHAT THEY SAID
“First Create The Media has been essential in helping us to navigate some quite tricky communications challenges. This, together with their super-organised approach to project management and real respect for our values and culture, mean we regard them as an essential part of our own team.”
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