News – Careers & Tenders
INVITATION TO TENDER: US PR support for the Longitude Prize on ALS
23 January 2025
About the Longitude Prize on ALS
The Longitude Prize on ALS, led by Challenge Works, is a multi-million-pound, international challenge prize to incentivise the use of AI to transform drug discovery for the treatment of ALS. ALS is currently untreatable, with only one medication that can slow progress of the disease. The Prize could result in the discovery of a cure, saving lives globally.
The Prize is looking for groundbreaking approaches to identification and validation of new targets, from those working in the biotechnology, AI and academic audiences.
These audiences will each have different barriers to entry, use different communications platforms and value different incentives.
What are we commissioning?
Challenge Works is looking for a North American PR agency that can understand, engage and excite each of these audiences, to drive them to enter the prize and create a buzz around the scale of opportunity in a way that tactically captures their attention.
Deadline for submissions: 6pm GMT / 1pm EST on Monday 10th February 2025.
Deliverables
Activity may include, but is not limited to:
- Refining US and Canadian media targets – in line with audience segmentation work.
- Refining US and Canada broader stakeholders – including possible judges, ambassadors, spokespeople and case studies for the campaign, including via partner and other charities.
- Campaign development and planning from a North America perspective – including updates to comms launch materials – including press release, reactive Q&A and media briefings.
- Creating a national marker moment/media piece in the US and Canada at launch that has broader reach.
- Generating media interest at key challenge peaks and making suggestions for a ‘news generation’ moment to sit outside of the peaks to maintain noise (budget dependent).
- Media support for US spokespeople/ambassadors and case studies – preparation for media interviews and other opportunities. Focus on relevant media to reach the biotech community.
- PR support for US and Canadian events –
- Recommending key events to attend and be on relevant panels.
- Engaging with and inviting journalists to key events, issuing local press releases, supporting in-person interviews at events as needed.
- Manage reactive media in markets, including any issues and possible proactive opportunities.
- Ad-hoc deliverables: to be defined and agreed.
Note – while the priority is the biotech innovators and wider ecosystem, it would be useful to consider how we raise the profile in the mainstream media at launch and from the convening stage onwards (highlighting the broader issue and the potential opportunity). - Monitoring and evaluation to measure the reach and impact of the campaign from a US perspective.
Any supplier would need to have considerable experience in these areas. We welcome examples of previous work in these areas to showcase your expertise, and will be looking for both an approach to campaign development and to key media in your response.
We are also looking for an agency that is willing to be agile throughout the challenge to ensure that activity is truly effective. When you pitch, we would like to see how you think about the different audiences (E.g. innovator vs influencers) and how we would reach them in the media and via stakeholders.
It is important that the awareness raised from the previous Longitude Prizes is leveraged for the campaign.
Tender details
Types of Services
We are looking for written proposals and quotations from potential suppliers to provide specialist PR and media support in the US and Canada to engage and persuade entrants from biotech, AI and academic audiences based in those regions to get excited and engage with the prize.
Key Audiences (US and Canada focus)
Potential innovators; we anticipate that potential innovators will come from a range of sectors, including:
- All Biotech, Techbio, AI and Pharma currently active in the ALS or neurodegenerative space,
- Biotech and Techbio not presently active in ALS who could participate in the Prize,
- The ALS research community,
- The neurodegeneration research community, particularly those working in FTD, Dementia, Parkinson’s etc,
- Academics specialising in AI/ML for health.
This tender will be looking for responses for supporting the first two stages of the Prize, with a focus on innovator recruitment from target audiences (drug discovery biotech, computational biologist and health AI specialists and the neurodegenerative disease scientific communities), awareness and engagement. We will be keen to see a mainstream marker piece to widen the reach at launch too.
How to apply
Please download the invitation to tender for full details.
Deadline for submissions
Your entire proposal, including all supporting documentation, should be no more than 15 pages with single-spaced text in 12-point font and on A4 paper. Your proposal should be e-mailed as a single document, to [email protected] by no later than 6pm GMT / 1pm EST on Monday 10th February 2025.
Please submit your proposal to Nesta in accordance with all the instructions and terms and conditions set out within the attached documentation.