Macmillan Cancer Support
Helping Macmillan speak to everyone living with cancer
We helped Macmillan Cancer Support build a consistent approach to inclusive communications that works for every person it reaches.
The challenge
Three million people in the UK have one thing in common: They’re living with cancer. But outside of this shared reality, their lives, identities, backgrounds and experiences are vastly different. The communications designed to support them needed to reflect that.
Macmillan Cancer Support is one of Britain’s largest charities. Deeply committed to supporting those living with cancer. To reach the people who need them most, they know how committed they also have to be to ensuring all communications are diverse, equitable and inclusive.
Their communications team is large, skilled and genuinely passionate about inclusive practice, and they are striving to improve this further. With a team producing communications across multiple channels for an extraordinarily diverse audience — people living with cancer, volunteers, the press, government, and the organisation itself — the challenge was in the alignment.
How do you ensure that inclusive practice isn’t dependent on individual knowledge or effort, but embedded in the way the whole team works, every time?
Macmillan needed a clear baseline, a set of priorities, and a practical plan. So they came to us to help build it.
Our approach
We began by establishing clear rules of engagement. Inclusive communications audits require honesty about what’s working, what isn’t, and where unconscious bias might be shaping decisions. At the Folk Group, we call this Real Talk. We don’t shy away from sharing uncomfortable truths, because ultimately, we want the work to feel human, and we want it to perform.
We created a safe, open environment where internal stakeholders could speak candidly about their ways of working, their challenges and the gaps they’d noticed.
From there, our approach had three strands.
We carried out in-depth interviews with internal stakeholders alongside a structured survey, mapping current practices, identifying inconsistencies and understanding where the team felt most and least confident delivering inclusive communications.
We engaged external stakeholders representing a diverse range of communities and circumstances, gathering the perspective of the people Macmillan’s communications are ultimately designed to reach.
And we assembled a bespoke Real Folk Panel: communications consultants with specific lived experience of cancer. Patients, survivors, and their family and friends. This panel conducted a deep dive review and audit of key Macmillan materials and processes, bringing a perspective that no internal team would have been able to replicate. These individuals had a direct hand in shaping how Macmillan communicates.
The impact
We gathered our findings and created a detailed report and presentation, outlining clear priorities, realistic timescales and concrete next steps the team could act on straight away.
These recommendations have given Macmillan’s team the clarity, education, and tools to help every future piece of communications reach, and connect with, more of their audience.
Clare Thomson, Head of Planning and Performance at Macmillan, said:
“We have a brilliant comms team who are passionate about inclusivity and it’s been so insightful to work with Folk to help us align best practices and create more consistency across the division. Folk provided a concrete plan, with practical actions — not just theoretical advice — that we’ve already started to roll out. We are now clear about what to prioritise to ensure that across the board we’re being as inclusive as possible when it comes to our communication outputs, which is an exciting step forward.
One of the things I most appreciated about working with Folk was being able to work with the same experienced, senior team throughout, from pitch right through to the end of a project that was delivered on time and to our needs.”
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