Over the weekend, we launched ‘The Most Valuable Portrait’—a powerful campaign from Specsavers Home Visits in partnership with Carers UK.

Valued symbolically at £184 billion—the estimated worth of unpaid care in the UK, equivalent to funding a second NHS—the portrait honours the immense contributions of carers who often go unseen.

Around 1 in 10 people in England and Wales are unpaid carers, but the true figure is much higher, as many people don’t immediately recognise themselves as carers.  In fact, over a third (36%) take more than three years to realise they’ve taken on this role, meaning they may be missing out on vital support available to them.

After its unveiling at the Saatchi Gallery, the portrait was displayed publicly at London’s South Bank, encased in a secure box and protected by 24-hour security. A striking way to make the invisible, visible.

Created by world-renowned artist Colin Davidson, the portrait features inspiring carer Jaycee le Bouche, representing the millions of carers across the UK.

Specsavers Home Visits witness the dedication of unpaid carers daily. Through this campaign, we aim to raise awareness and celebrate their extraordinary efforts.

The portrait has now been put up for sale via an online auction, with all proceeds going to Carers UK.

Watch the campaign film here – The Most Valuable Portrait | Specsavers UK

We’re thrilled to share that Virgo Health has been named Best Agency in Pharma/Healthcare for the second year running at the PRWeek UK Corporate Affairs Awards 2025.

The judges praised our agency for “excellent client feedback, financial performance and team development,” as well as our ambition to lead healthcare communications from both a scientific and cultural perspective. From achieving 400% above-target hearing test bookings, to identifying unmet needs in women’s health, and boosting vaccine uptake in hard-to-reach communities, our campaigns are making a real-world impact.

We were also recognised for our expanding capabilities, with the launch of our corporate health offering, already partnering with top 10 global pharma companies. Our Misheard Manifesto campaign with Specsavers took home the award for Best Use of Media Relations in Pharma/Healthcare as well as two highly commended for Media Relations City and Corporate and Best Use of Social Media and/or Influencers – Pharma Healthcare.

Any accolade for our agency is an accolade for our incredible team and testament to our culture than enables people to bring their outstanding expertise to our work every single day. Learn more about Virgo’s culture in our Life at Virgo page.

By Imogen Holland and Amy McDermott

A few weeks ago, we blended two of the most exciting aspects of our agency together – our commitment to CSR and our commitment to strategic, insight-driven communications that embody our ethos of Being Human.

We invited the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to share a communications challenge with us. We then divided into groups to put our recent training into practice, to deliver strategic pro bono communications plans and ideas for the BHF.

The BHF is the UK’s largest independent funder of heart and circulatory research, helping to find treatments that give people more time with loved ones.

To kick off our afternoon, Josie Roberts and Saneeta Mandil from the BHF shared that while the BHF’s research funding comes primarily from legacy gifts and fundraising activities, their retail operations contribute a crucial 15-20% toward their lifesaving work. So, they set us the challenge to apply Virgo’s expertise to deliver communications plans that would encourage high-quality donations to BHF shops and online stores.

There was a buzz of energy in the room as colleagues from different departments came together, blending strategy, communications, medical education and creativity to tackle this challenge. Teams immersed themselves and were able to ask Josie and Saneeta any questions to help define their objectives enabling them to craft innovative campaigns and map out execution channels. All teams then presented their unique solutions and bold campaign ideas, that challenged perceptions about charity shop donations. One team even producing a video in under an hour!

In the end, one of our teams emerged victorious and was declared the winner, with the BHF even hoping to take their idea further and perhaps even into the real world.

This event perfectly captured what makes Virgo such a special place to work. Nearly two years into our careers within the pharma communications team, the agency has played a crucial role in our development, providing training and opportunities that have broadened our expertise in client relations and widening our industry knowledge.

As we reflect on our work with the BHF, we’re reminded of the collaborative spirit at Virgo. Our approach to projects, whether for clients or community partners, remains consistent: bringing creativity and strategic thinking to challenges that matter…and having lots of fun along the way. We look forward to more opportunities like this!

By Nina Bhagwat, Group People Engagement Director  

Today we are launching our most comprehensive London People Engagement Plan ever. It’s a reflection on what we have achieved, what we have heard, what we have learnt, as well as what we will focus on for the future.  

We hope you will recognise this as a transparent outline of our progress and a way to hold ourselves accountable, not a corporate show and tell. Because while sharing this is vital to create change, our approach to People Engagement is far more focussed on our people and how we bring many hearts, hands and minds together to create a more inclusive culture internally. 

READ THE PLAN HERE

The road to creating this plan has been an act of inclusion in itself and we’ve learnt a lot about ourselves along the way – from forming our inclusion ambition and behaviours in all staff sessions, to focus groups and steering groups on the content to actually creating the copy and design.  

This is also for the first time we’ve reported our data. We are reporting our inclusion statistics from our annual BELONG survey and our representation data from our newly-implemented Self ID, voluntary People Engagement system. 

We are committed creating a diverse and inclusive culture and know a huge part of this is sharing data on representation and inclusion. Our BELONG inclusion data shows promising progress, but while we don’t have the full Self ID data picture yet, we have transparently outlined our progress in the Plan. We will be reporting this data annually for accountability and once we have a more complete data set we fully commit to reporting annually on Pay Gaps.