I led this project end-to-end as Senior Consultant at Principals, Australia.
The Challenge:
The RACGP Strategy placed a strong focus on growing the number of International members in the next three years.
There were three main goals:
1. Add value to International Medical Graduate (IMG) members
2. Grow the overseas audience & acquire new overseas members
3. Position RACGP as the premium GP education provider and commercialise
education.
Our process:
Our process enabled a test and learn approach to designing the most meaningful value propositions for a diverse range of international members and delivered an evidence-base that ensured the value propositions were truly viable, before their launch.
With over 42% of RACGP’s 41,000 members coming from countries other than Australia, we needed to understand the various cohorts in more detail – especially their motivations to join and expectations of value.
Our human-centred Design Sprint allowed us to start diagnosing the opportunity space immediately, beginning with synthesizing all available research, data and analytics then designing internal sessions, drawing out subject matter expertise from across the organisation – and from across the globe – around what the ‘current state’ offering was and how that might be reimagined to serve the specific needs of a diverse cohort of professionals at different stages of their careers.
Based on these sessions we developed our Value Proposition Design workshops, again with a mix of internal and external experts as well as International Members themselves.
Insights:
Our detailed interviews, workshop sessions and group work enabled us to co-design a range of hypothetical value propositions which we then validated with member interviews across India, Iran, Africa, Malaysia and the UK.
As part of this process, we identified three key cohorts, each with distinct but related needs and behavioural mindsets.
We began to frame these cohorts as Stayers, Movers and Maintainers.
Stayers: Want to become a best-in-class doctor in their country.
Movers: Want a future in Australia.
Maintainers: Want to stay connected to Australia.
Having defined the key cohorts and validated our hypothetical value propositions, we needed to pressure test these in the real world to gauge their true value and give us an evidence-base for future investment.
Testing propositions live, in-market
Quickly testing messages in real time gave us tangible insight into which value propositions resonant most strongly, helping validate demand.
Based on the learnings from these experiments, we then were able to refine messaging and inform the content creation calendar in
areas such as training or community building.
Working with RACGP internal design team, we created a series of adverts for placement in appropriate media for each cohort in that country/ market.
Design, test, learn
To be considered viable and valuable, our value propositions had to drive real-world responses.
We developed ad layouts and headline messaging with calls to action that spoke to our understanding of the deep drivers for cohorts in each country and at each stage.
Viewers of these adverts had to be sufficiently attracted to the offer messaging and call to action that they click through in their busy days to a web page that would then be compelling enough to get them to complete a form and sign up to something that ultimately costs over $400 a year…
These had to work in UAE, Malaysia, India and UK/NZ, for a diverse range of JTBD, career stages and personas.
We were able to drive hundreds of people from our prototype ads, to landing pages.
(Their digital agency were staggered as they thought we’d have to have it in market for months and use paid search to validate at reasonable numbers, but we did it in less than two weeks).
The Result:
We ran 6 Ads over 10 days in India, UAE, Pakistan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Over 400k impressions delivered 864 unique visitors to our pages where we achieved a
45% conversion rate.
Codifying our learnings:
Based on the insights gained we were able to confidently define the value proposition for each cohort, then audit the existing content to create a roadmap of the content and offerings we had now that would be compelling – as well as the ones that we would need to invest in designing later.
We then packaged everything into a Playbook that allowed the team to demonstrate to the Exec the value that the International Member cohort redesigned and restructured their International Member page/s on their main website, defined
This is a very cost-effective way to take on a strategic challenge, do research/workshops, ideate, design, build and test, while enhancing the capability of the organisation to create value for customers.
From strategy to action
Not only did our process create a clear path to rapid growth for international markets, but we equipped the team with the insights, assets and writing guides they need to communicate effectively and speak to the nuanced needs of our audience.
The 40 page playbook we create helped accelerate understanding across the organisation of the value the international members offer – and inspiring the whole organisation in new ways of working to create new forms of value.
Lavanya Ashok 