How ZERO’s Strategic Plan Will Improve Prostate Cancer Outcomes

A New Standard for Impact

One question kept coming up as we built ZERO’s new strategic plan: How do we know it’s working?

Not just: Did we reach more people? Did we launch a good program? Did people show up? But did something change because ZERO was there? Did someone get screened earlier? Did a patient get connected to the right care? Did we remove a barrier that helped someone live longer or live better?

That is the standard behind ZERO’s new strategic plan through 2029.

Our board approved the plan this spring, and we put it into motion in April. It reflects months of work across our organization, looking honestly at where ZERO can have the greatest impact, challenging assumptions, and making intentional choices about where we focus.

Moving Beyond the Numbers

ZERO has been doing this work for 30 years. Every day, patients and families turn to us for navigation, financial help, and community. We know these programs matter. But this plan asks for more. It is not enough to know our programs help people; we must build evidence showing which interventions improve outcomes, why they work, and how they can be replicated.

Nonprofits are very good at counting activity: people reached, events held, dollars raised. Those numbers matter, but they don’t tell the whole story. We want to prove what happened because ZERO was there.

Did someone get screened who otherwise would not have? Did a patient better understand his treatment options? Did someone overcome a transportation, financial, or access barrier? Did a person get connected to care earlier? Did an intervention ultimately help someone live longer or live better?

And then comes the next question:

If something works, how do we make sure it doesn’t stop with ZERO?

Proof lets us walk into a health system, a community organization, or a provider’s office and say: here’s what we learned. Here’s what worked. Here’s the evidence. Here’s how you can do it too.

That is the difference between running great programs and helping drive systemic change.

And that is what this strategic plan is really about.

Building the Proof

Over the next several years, our work is centered around three connected priorities:

Proving local systems change at scale
Building stronger measurement and impact capabilities, and
Leading the national prostate cancer conversation with evidence and the voices of patients and families.

You will see those priorities come to life in several ways.

This fall, we are launching the most comprehensive state of prostate cancer experience survey in U.S. history: the Prostate Cancer BEACON Survey: Barriers, Education, Awareness, Care, Outcomes and Needs.

BEACON will hear from more than 10,000 people across the prostate cancer experience: men at screening age, people living with prostate cancer, family care partners, and the doctors and nurses on the front lines of care.

We want a much clearer picture of what people know, what they do not know, where they encounter barriers, what support they need, and where the prostate cancer system is working… or isn’t.

Because you cannot fix what you do not fully understand.

BEACON will help ZERO make better decisions, but our ambition is much bigger than that. We want what we learn to be useful to researchers, health systems, providers, community organizations, and others working to improve prostate cancer outcomes.

Proving What Works in Communities

We are also going deeper with Blitz the Barriers, our work to address prostate cancer disparities community by community. This is not about showing up for one event and moving on. It is about building relationships with local organizations, health systems, community leaders, and the people who understand the barriers men face because they see them every day.

Then we ask: What changed? What worked? What didn’t? What should we do differently? And most importantly, could what worked here work somewhere else?

The goal is not simply to do good work in individual communities. The goal is to build proof points that can travel.

If we can demonstrate that an intervention improves screening, removes a barrier to care, helps a patient navigate treatment, or improves another meaningful outcome, our responsibility does not end with celebrating that success.

Our job is to share it. And that is how local work becomes systemic change.

Leading a Bigger Prostate Cancer Conversation

We are also preparing for the largest public awareness effort in ZERO’s history.

In February, ZERO will make history, launching the first national prostate cancer public service campaign in the U.S. Partnering with an organization behind some of the country's most recognized campaigns, we will reach millions of people with clearer, more urgent information about prostate cancer risk and screening.

Prostate cancer has not received the level of public attention its impact warrants.

ZERO intends to help change that.

But leading the conversation is not simply about being louder.

It means bringing evidence to policymakers. It means helping the media understand what is changing in prostate cancer. It means making complicated science understandable to patients and families. It means sharing what we learn with providers and health systems.

And it means making sure the experiences of people living with prostate cancer...and the people who care for them...shape the conversation from the beginning.

Holding Ourselves Accountable

This is also the first time we are putting a strategic plan like this in front of our community in such a public way. That is intentional. We are already tracking our progress against this plan, and we will share what we learn along the way: where we are seeing impact, where things are working, and where we need to adjust.

A strategic plan should not live in a PDF. It should change what an organization does, and this one already is.

Thirty years into ZERO’s work, we know how much progress is possible. This next chapter is about raising the standard for how we define impact… and what we do with what we learn.

We are getting clearer about what we are trying to change. And we are building the ability to prove whether we are changing it. Because our job is not only to do great work. It is to prove what works, share what we learn, and help make the best ideas bigger than ZERO.

Talk to the men in your life about prostate cancer risk and screening. Ask questions. Share what you are learning. Partner with us. And hold us accountable to the commitments in this plan.

We are building the proof. And we are using that proof to help change what prostate cancer looks like in this country.

That is our new standard for impact.

Courtney Bugler
President & CEO
ZERO Prostate Cancer