Beyond the Bell: Helping women find a new rhythm after breast cancer treatment

Project overview

Beyond the Bell was a partnership between Novartis UK and Leanne Pero MBE, breast cancer advocate and founder of Black Women Rising. The programme focused on raising awareness of recurrence concerns and supporting more open conversations about life after breast cancer treatment.

By combining lived experience, patient insight and communications expertise, the partnership helped ensure the realities of survivorship remained at the centre of programme development while encouraging broader discussion around life beyond treatment.

A campaign video told women’s stories through the medium of dance. It featured Leanne Pero and professional dancer Amy Dowden. A launch event and social media campaign extended the reach of the programme, which directed people to further information and support on the Keep Ahead website.

Finding the right partner

The partnership began with a shared recognition that conversations about life after breast cancer treatment needed to be shaped by people with direct lived experience.

Novartis wanted to use dance as a creative medium to translate potentially daunting conversations around risk of recurrence and life after active clinical treatment into an engaging, accessible and emotive campaign. This meant it was important to identify someone for whom dance felt like a natural form of expression.

Leanne Pero was identified as an ideal partner because of her extensive work as a breast cancer advocate, community leader and founder of Black Women Rising, as well as her previous experience with dance.

Through years of supporting women affected by breast cancer, Leanne had developed a deep understanding of the emotional and practical challenges many women face after treatment ends. Her ability to connect personal experience with broader community insight helped ensure the programme was grounded in authenticity from the outset.

Early discussions with Leanne focused on understanding the experiences of women navigating life after treatment, identifying the right language and exploring how support could be strengthened. These discussions helped shape programme objectives and ensured patient perspectives informed decision-making from an early stage.

Leanne was instrumental in shaping the channel strategy and directing Novartis towards relevant voices to engage with the campaign, helping to maintain authenticity and generate organic conversation around the campaign narrative.

The partnership was built on open dialogue, with everyone aligned around a shared goal of encouraging more informed conversations and helping women feel better supported beyond treatment.

Leanne Pero played an active role in shaping programme themes, storytelling approaches and content development, helping ensure conversations around recurrence and survivorship reflected the realities faced by women affected by breast cancer.

Scoping and contracting 

Leanne was directly contracted for participation in the campaign by Novartis based on her contribution to the project, which included consultancy, media engagement, participation in the campaign launch and content creation events such as filming.

This project is innovative for Novartis, and within the context of strict external and internal regulations it was crucial to have early conversations with legal, compliance and medical signatories to ensure clarity around roles, deliverables and compliance requirements.

The experience highlighted an opportunity to further streamline future patient partnerships through earlier contracting discussions, clearer upfront guidance and, where appropriate, standardised contractual language or templates for projects involving a lot of external exposure.

Implementation 

Leanne Pero played a central role throughout the programme delivery, helping ensure the experiences and perspectives of women affected by breast cancer were reflected across the campaign. As both a patient advocate and founder of Black Women Rising, she brought lived experience, community insight and trusted engagement that helped shape storytelling, discussion content and public-facing activity.

The partnership supported the development of the Beyond the Bell campaign, which used lived experience storytelling to explore the realities of life after treatment. Professional dancer Amy Dowden and Leanne Pero shared their personal experiences through a campaign film, a launch event and across social media.

The initiative expanded through media engagement, educational resources, social media activity and The Sounding Room discussion series, all designed to encourage more open conversations about recurrence risk and survivorship.

Closing out the project

The partnership demonstrated how lived-experience can play a meaningful role in shaping patient-centred programmes. By involving Leanne Pero throughout development and delivery, Novartis was able to ground the programme in authentic patient insight and create opportunities for broader community conversations about life after treatment.

Recurrence risk can be a sensitive topic that many women find difficult to discuss. The widespread perception that ‘ringing the bell’ marks the end of the cancer journey can make conversations about ongoing concerns more challenging. Ensuring discussions were informative and empowering without increasing anxiety required careful collaboration and patient input.

Strong alignment between Novartis UK and patient community representatives around shared objectives were key enablers. Involvement of people with lived experience throughout programme development and delivery was meaningful. Trusted patient advocacy leadership through Leanne Pero allowed the development of creative approach, translating complex information into relatable, human stories.

Impact of the project

The partnership successfully increased public discussion about breast cancer recurrence risk and encouraged greater engagement with educational resources.

• Social listening identified a 26% increase in online conversation about recurrence following the campaign launch

• 77% of respondents who visited the Keep Ahead website said they intended to discuss recurrence risk with their healthcare team

• 570k views of campaign content shared by Leanne and Amy, 19k engagements for influencer-led content

The programme also generated extensive positive media coverage and strong public engagement, demonstrating the value of combining patient insight with lived experience-led storytelling.

Campaign has been recognised externally, being shortlisted for four European and UK marketing and communications awards

Perhaps most importantly, the partnership helped create space for conversations that many women had previously found difficult to initiate.

Key learnings

• The power of patient storytelling. Partnerships are stronger when trusted community leaders and lived-experience experts are involved alongside patient organisations. Their deep community connections bring distinctive insight, authenticity and reach, helping programmes remain relevant to patients’ needs.

• The value of a strong omnichannel strategy. We've built a strategy that is flexible and adjustable for various platforms that feels authentic for our patient voices.

• The importance of local granular insight known to patients and comprehensible for all. To activate locally we’ve identified a creative territory and symbol that already sparks debate in the public space – ringing the end of treatment bell.

FA-11804506 | October 2026