Winning award entry announced at Apteco Live 2023

Apteco Live 2023, Apteco's 17th annual user group conference and second hybrid event, took place over two days on 17 and 20 November. Apteco Live is considered one of the year's highlights for Apteco's partners and end users, and an opportunity to demonstrate the latest enhancements to Apteco's range of marketing software solutions.

Once again, Apteco partners and customers gathered in-person on day one at a Central London venue where the event was live streamed to online delegates in the UK and worldwide. The following week all delegates attended online where they watched this year’s shortlisted finalists present their award entries before an online vote.

Winner of the 'Best use of Apteco software award 2023'

Apteco received some fantastic entries again this year for the 'Best use of Apteco software award' competition, all showcasing the effective use of Apteco software to drive marketing activities, improve the customer experience and reward those who have delivered measurable benefits to their organisation as a result.

Congratulations go to the Department of Health & Social Care and Apteco premium partner and 2023 Star Partner, Paragon DCX, who after live voting on day two of Apteco Live 2023, were announced as winners of the 'Best use of Apteco software award 2023'.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) support ministers in the UK in leading the nation’s health and social care - to help people live more independent, healthier lives, for longer. When developing policies and guidelines, it is the Department’s aim to motivate and support millions more people to make and sustain changes that will improve their health, with policies and guidelines that will:

• Improve healthcare outcomes by providing high-quality and sustainable care at the right time in the right place and by improving infrastructure and transforming technology.
• Improve, protect, and level up the nation’s health, including through reducing health disparities.
• Improve social care outcomes through an affordable, high quality and sustainable adult social care system.

As a longstanding partner, having supported DHSC across their range of Better Health branded support products and tools, as well as having worked in Government behavioural change activity for many years, DCX understand how difficult it is to help parents to look after their family’s health. There are many barriers to eating better and moving more.

The primary aim of the campaign was to encourage and support families to adopt more healthy lifestyle behaviours, leading with nutrition but also covering physical activity, family wellbeing and parental health, with an emphasis on cost where appropriate. By impacting behaviours of the families, the campaign also needed to generate robust learnings, both to measure effectiveness and identify how best to grow and improve the programme offering, should it prove effective. Targeting families with school-age children, with an emphasis towards those in lower socio demographic groups and living in areas with higher levels of deprivation, support would be provided digitally to these groups (predominantly via email).

Using both their experience and evidence from previous Government campaigns, they developed the email programme with bite size chunks of information that would move parents on step-by-step, showing how the collective impacts of small steps can add up to big differences to their family’s health. They also recognised that people’s issues will be different, so they offered a choice of varying content by the issues that mattered most to them.

Four key channels were chosen to help promote the Healthy Steps programme – acquisition emails, social media, paid search, and partnership activities - encouraging individuals to sign up to the campaign via the registration page. Here they were asked a series of questions to help identify what topics would be best suited to help them and their family.

The programme was a success, creating positive behaviour shifts across the nation.

Often this has near doubled the percentages doing the positive behaviour, and near halved those who were engaging in negative behaviours. As a result of using Apteco, DHSC now has great agility to test, learn and implement updates to support continuous improvement and new features. In the future they will look forward to building this campaign into a multi-channel programme, and to using additional technologies such as WhatsApp to support in communicating with those hard-to-reach users who are often the most vulnerable.

Paragon DCX praised the software saying:

“We’ve been supporting the DHSC team to help the nation live healthier lives for 17 years, and citizen data has always been critical for both activity and measurement.  The Apteco suite has been instrumental in both improving the accessibility of data and insight, and in increasing efficiency in campaigns.”

Sally Phillips, Head of Data and Systems

The Department of Health and Social Care added to this, commenting:

"Healthy Steps is a critical program helping to tackle childhood obesity, working together with DCX and the Apteco platform we have delivered an automated 8-week comms journey and showing amazing results in the pilot phase.”

Orla Hugueniot, Head of Early Years Marketing Programmes

Apteco would also like to congratulate Plan International UK and Wood for Trees part of The Salocin Group who came in second place in this year’s competition. They completed their mission to create a compelling Campaigner Email Welcome journey, recognising the critical importance of engaging newly recruited campaigners and donors at the outset of their involvement using Apteco software.

Apteco would also like to congratulate our third-place winner, Caravan and Motorhome Club and Communisis, who used Apteco software to create a solution where members could provide their insurance renewal dates for a range of products, from Caravan Cover to Home Insurance. With the functionality in Peoplestage, it has also been possible to create personalised product specific links to place in appropriate emails, resulting in an increase of 59.3% renewal months being collected, across 9 different insurance and cover products. 

Learn more about Apteco's previous award winners in our awards hall of fame.