I would say there are two key “ahas” that come out of the BIOADVOCATE BENCHMARK.
The first is that the industry is only spending between 0.01% and 0.08% of annual revenue on advocacy. In my opinion, that’s laughable—it’s way too small. But with that has also come some realization.
To give you an example:
If you’re an organization that’s focused on, let’s say, eight or more different disease states, you’re a pretty
large pharma organization. You typically have over 40 people in the advocacy function and a budget of over $25 million.
The “wow” for me has been the number of organizations I’ve spoken with that are in that spot but aren’t anywhere near those numbers.
As we can see from the ELAVAY report, they’re doing amazing work. Based on feedback from their customers, they’re doing incredible work, but they’re doing it with maybe a third of the budget and team size.
So, imagine the work that could be done if they were right-sized for what we’ve been seeing across the industry.
That has been a lot of the discussion:
We have the data to show where team sizes and budget allocations should be. And the budget doesn’t even include what it costs to have a team. It’s just a set amount of dollars each year for supporting patient advocacy organizations.
We know what this should look like for an organization of a specific size. Then, depending on the data from ELAVAY—whether it’s good or bad—we’re able to help make claims strategically inside the organization. We help with those internal dialogues as a third party that’s unbiased and focused solely on what the data is telling us.
This approach has been extremely well received. Many have said, “Wow, we need to have some internal conversations.”
Some customers have even come to us very last minute—sometimes the day before big internal leadership meetings—hoping to understand what the data shows for an organization of their size.
One big organization in oncology should have a team of between 30 and 35 people. They have about 14.
Albeit, they look fantastic. They’ve been doing an excellent job and growing in the ELAVAY study year over year.
A lot of the dialogue we’ve been helping them have internally is:
Imagine the amount of work we could do, how great we would look in the community, and how much trust we could build if we were to triple the size of our team and budget.
