When you look at ELAVAY, it is a report that provides feedback to the industry from the nonprofit sector.

It examines questions such as:

• What do our relationships look like with the nonprofit sector as an industry advocacy function?
• What work are we doing that is noted as being good?
• What’s not so good?
• What do patients need from us?

On the flip side, the BIOADVOCATE BENCHMARK gathers feedback from the industry instead of nonprofits.

It asks:

• What does the advocacy function look like at your organization?

This feedback has allowed us to create a groundbreaking study. No one has looked at benchmarking in advocacy before. We now have it across all domains of healthcare in the pharma world.

It doesn’t matter your role—if you’re customer-facing, there is benchmarking data out there. We wanted to provide advocacy with an opportunity to have more informed internal dialogues, such as:

• Why do we need more resources or more people?
• What does everyone else in similar roles, working on the same number of disease states, look like?

We wanted to give this benchmarking back to the industry to provide firepower for these internal discussions.

The report is mainly quantitative, focusing on key issues like:

• How many disease states are you focused on?

This is an important question because, as you might imagine, the more disease states you manage, the more nonprofit organizations and professional societies you need to work with. This, in turn, drives the required budget.

We want to understand:

• What is your budget?
• What is your team size?
• Where did your people come from, and how are they hired internally?
• What’s their role and level within your organization?

These are challenges many advocacy leaders face, such as advocating for senior director roles or even VP-level roles for their teams. Often, they haven’t had the data to support these requests.

Being able to truly understand the advocacy function inside and out within the industry is now allowing teams to have the deep discussions necessary to determine what’s right for their organization.