Take These Steps to Assess a Healthcare Organization’s Readiness for
Marketing Initiatives

Recently, the SPRYTE team participated in the New England Society for Healthcare Communications’ (NESHCo) monthly webinar, “Do You Deserve to be Marketed?,” which focused on the importance of assessing an organization’s readiness for marketing initiatives.

During the webinar, Helayne Lightstone – senior director of marketing and branding for Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut – outlined the following steps healthcare communicators must take before executing a campaign to ensure its success.

Step 1: Assessment

The first step in a “marketing readiness plan” is assessing the key aspects of your campaign. To build the foundation for a successful campaign, answer the following questions:

• What are your benchmark metrics?

• Are you looking to bring in more patients and/or build awareness about your organization?

• What are the differentiators of the product/service/initiative you’re promoting?

• Is your organization ready to handle the impact of a successful campaign? Do you have a plan for accommodating more patients or a crossover referral strategy?

• Have you conducted market research for this campaign?

• What is the competition in your market? Have your competitors implemented similar campaigns?

Step 2: Analysis

After answering all of the questions to identify those key aspects in Step 1, you then must take a deeper dive to analyze two important points of the campaign:

• Value: Is there a high demand for the service/product/initiative you’re promoting, or is the market oversaturated? How differentiated is your offering, and is it a money maker?

• Readiness: Are the physicians and staff members involved equipped with the right messaging and training for this campaign? Do you have set patient referral and response tracking plans?
  
  Are all of the physical and digital collateral, including the website, logos, signage, etc. up-to-date and aligned with the campaign’s messaging?

Step 3: Advance and Apply

Once you’ve developed a clear understanding of your goals, readiness and timing, you can now work together with your team to flesh out the campaign. Be sure to establish a set approval pathway that involves all necessary team members, which may include marketing, creative, clinical, legal, financial and executive personnel. Be sure to engage all members of the team to make sure the process runs as smoothly as possible.

Is Your Organization Ready?

Even the most engaging campaign won’t make an impact if it reaches the wrong audience at the wrong time. By taking these steps, you’ll lay the groundwork to ensure your campaign resonates with the right patients.

Note: Hartford HealthCare Medical Group is one of the largest practices in Connecticut with over 50 locations and over 450 physicians and advanced practitioners.

The Key Considerations

In conjunction with last week's blog, we are resharing our post about important things healthcare organizations should consider when creating an Employee Ambassador program.

Congratulations! Your organization agrees that leveraging key employees as brand ambassadors will lead to better reach, credibility and engagement than your own company channels can achieve.

Scenario planning, creating guidelines, training and selecting the right employees and best content to share are the key considerations in designing and launching an Employee Ambassador program.

Developing clear guidance: It goes without saying that you must get the buy-in of senior management – particularly because of its potential impact on corporate reputation. After their buy in, your next meeting will be with your legal/regulatory and medical team to create an issues preparedness plan and program guidelines.

The development process may take several months to a year. But when completed, it will serve as the working guidebook for employee ambassadors and the internal team that manages the program.

• Issues preparedness: Working with your legal, medical, social media, communications and HR team, identify potentially negative scenarios and issues related to employees engaging in social media on your company’s behalf. Use these findings to develop a “Regulation Roadmap.” This roadmap will provide communications guidance and responses – including messages and social media copy aligned with Food & Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations – for the most likely scenarios.

• Employee guidelines: Your employees need to abide by clearly articulated rules. The purpose of these rules is to guide employees’ content without telling them exactly what to say. Their content is liked and shared by others because they inject their own character and personality into posts.

Guidelines should include background on the company and what it stands for, program goals, the brand voice, how to stay compliant with regulations, responsible social media strategies and how to handle questions on their posts. They should also include information about who to contact in case of a question or issue.

Choosing the right employees: Recruiting employees to become advocates isn’t as difficult as you may think. You can start with enthusiastic employees who already share your company’s message. Or just ask for volunteers and triage the employees who opt in. Prioritize those who have large online followings and an online voice consistent with that of your organization. No matter your method, you’ll need to audit their social media channels to identify any red flags or opportunities. The audit will also help inform your training program.

• Training: The employees who volunteer as ambassadors will probably be social media savvy. Still, you need to ensure they are savvy about the rules and expectations of your program, so we always recommend conducting a formal training program for all participants.

Content: Employee ambassadors should be viewed by their followers as healthcare influencers, not as a mouthpiece for your company. Therefore, most of the content you provide should focus on general health and wellness; only a third to a half should be about your company.

Before making content available, seek your employee ambassadors’ input on the type of content they like to share. The more relevant the content, the more likely they are to use it.

Via the company intranet or another easily accessible online storage unit, curate a variety of approved articles, visuals and video they can easily share and continually encourage feedback. Health and wellness content may include tips, recipes, photos or infographics developed by your company for your own channels or by third parties. While expensive to produce, video and visuals are more frequently shared than articles, so try to include some in the mix.

Keep content fresh by ensuring that future corporate initiatives and marketing programs include development of ambassador materials as part of the plan. Communicate with your ambassadors first about updates and changes, new products and other company news.

Measurement and analytics: There are many ways to measure the success of your employee ambassador program and the metrics you choose will be based on your goals. At a minimum, you should be analyzing the following:

• Program reach: How many people did your ambassadors reach with company related content? How many posts contained the company hashtag?

• Traffic on company sites: Was there an increase in traffic on your owned and shared sites during the program?

• Ambassador engagement: What percent of employee ambassadors participated in the program and how frequently did they participate? Who were the most and least active ambassadors? Which ambassador’s posts had the most engagement (likes, comments, shares)?

These metrics will help you understand how active your employees are and the type of content with the most engagement – information fundamental for continuing the program – and hopefully for the program’s continued success.

Enjoy Awareness, Credibility and Endorsement

This week, we are revisiting our previous blog post about why employees can be the best brand ambassadors for healthcare organizations.

The healthcare industry is governed by rules under a whole host of government agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and Health & Human Services (HHS). You’re already challenged with getting content approved for your brand or company’s own channels. Knowing the implications of a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violation or FTC misstep, why would you consider asking your employees to advocate for your company?

The short answer? The right employees are the best brand ambassadors, providing the kind of awareness, credibility and endorsement for your company or brand that can’t be bought. Consider the following:

• Increased reach: Employees can reach patients in their social graph who might not be considering your brand – and might never seek out your website or social channels. Employees’ social media posts reach 561 percent further and are re-shared 24 times more than the same posts shared by a company’s social and owned channels.

• Authenticity and credibility: Today’s health consumers shop for healthcare services the way they shop for other expensive purchases. Regardless of how healthcare evolves under the new Presidential administration, consumers will continue to have a lot more choice in who provides their healthcare. They are researching healthcare the way they do other services – seeking information online and soliciting the opinions of others. Half of all consumer buying decisions are influenced by word of mouth and according to one study, 92 percent of people trust recommendations from people they know.

• Engagement: Across all industries, consumers are increasingly less interested in what companies have to say, favoring instead the opinions of influencers and the people behind the brand. A study released last year by Altimeter Group found that 21 percent of consumers said they “liked” employee posts about companies — an engagement rate comparable to or better than other social advertising campaigns at a much lower cost.

• Addressing risks upfront and providing clear guidance to employees considerably mitigates risk: The biggest question is how to manage risk. And it should be. Once management buys into an employee ambassador plan, your first step will be partnering with your legal and medical team to anticipate possible negative scenarios and developing guidance on how to handle each one. You will need to make sure, for example, that programs comply with FTC regulations by having employees include a hashtag in all posts to make it clear that they are employees. You also will want to develop clear direction on adhering to HIPAA guidelines.

Getting your employee ambassador program up and running will take some work. But once you create guidelines and identify and train employees, our hope is that you will find the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Tips for Building Rapport and Becoming a Go-To Source

Capturing the attention of a healthcare reporter is the age-old challenge for health communications professionals. But, you can improve your odds if you remember the “relations” part of public relations.

In a past webinar hosted by the New England Society of Healthcare Communications (NESHCo), of which SPRYTE is a member, Jessica Bartlett, the healthcare reporter for the Boston Business Journal, shared her advice for building mutually beneficial relationships with reporters.

Her tips went beyond the healthcare industry; touching on, for example, simple ways to stay in contact with reporters so they’ll be more likely to read your next pitch.

These days, that means following the reporter on social media, primarily Twitter in Bartlett’s case, getting a sense of what kind of stories they write, and where their passions lie, both professionally and outside of the newsroom. Open a friendly dialogue, like and retweet their tweets (tagging the reporter), and above all, reach out occasionally when you’re NOT pitching a story, to share something of interest, or to compliment a recent story.

That’s a great way to build your creds as a friendly source, but with a growing universe of journalists covering every industry, it’s not practical with everyone. At a minimum, you should look at social media profiles and read recent articles by reporters you want to pitch.

Bartlett is not unlike other healthcare business writers in the topics she likes to cover. These include:

• Growths/mergers/acquisitions
• Hiring/layoffs
• Groundbreaking science with business implications
• Financial changes
• Lawsuits
• Policy proposals with large-scale ramifications
• Executive changes
• Local takes on national hot healthcare topics
• Analysis of healthcare trends with large impact

Before sending the pitch, ask yourself whether your story will interest a large number of people, is healthcare-related, and above all, why it is important now? Bartlett noted she’s far more likely to open and consider a pitch, among the hundreds she receives weekly, when there’s a timely element.

Her point speaks to a reality of journalism: breaking news is always hot, while more “evergreen” stories — even those with merit — get relegated to the back burner. Although print deadlines and print publications are still foundational in our industry, daily e-mail blasts and the online publication need constant feeding, so timely content is always welcome – and prioritized.

Keep in mind a good journalist relationship should go both ways. The writer will know you’re “in the know” about your clients and can put her in touch with appropriate spokespeople quickly; and you’ll be more comfortable when responding to negative news or discussing controversial issues, like a strike or lawsuit.

Remember, too, that from the journalist’s point of view, being first is only second to being accurate. So, if you can respond quickly, preferably before anyone else, you’ll be much more likely to get your organization included. And the reporter will be more inclined to reach out to you the next time. That’s what media relations is all about.

What Avatar Teaches Us About Using an Empathetic Approach to Treating Patients

In our blog post for this week, guest blogger Rebecca Bryan, DNP, adult nurse practitioner and Owner of Rebecca Bryan Consulting LLC, discusses the importance of understanding health concerns from the patient's perspective.

My favorite moment in the movie Avatar is the love scene between protagonist Jake and Neytiri, a female Na’vi on the planet Pandora. Neytiri finds Jake’s Na’vi avatar unresponsive in the forest and realizes that his human form is in the mobile lab.

She jumps through the shattered window to find him unconscious and near death, suffocating in Pandora’s atmosphere. Desperately placing the oxygen mask on his face, she watches as Jake comes to life, looks Neytiri in the eyes, and says, “I see you.” Neytiri, who prior to this point, has only seen Jake in his avatar form, smiles and responds tenderly, “I see you.”

To appreciate the fullness of this moment, understand that humans were the enemy to the Na’vi, appropriating and destroying their sacred planet. Neytiri had fallen in love with Jake in his avatar form and was devastated when she learned he was human. This love scene was the moment when masks, paradoxically, removed, and soul saw soul, regardless of form.

Etic vs. Emic

That’s the shift in perspective from etic to emic.

That’s the paradigm that can put the patient in the center of the healthcare team.

I have been lecturing about, and helping organizations become, trauma-informed since 2013, but only recently discovered the vocabulary of “etic vs emic” as two ways to understand human behavior. This language was first coined by Kenneth Pike, a linguistic theoretician, in 1954, with etic pertaining to objective findings and emic pertaining to the meaning behind a finding.

With regard to human behavior, particularly through biomedical lens, an etic approach looks at a problem from the outside in. It relies on objective criteria to make a diagnosis, which is consistent with the traditional allopathic model.

Take cigarette smoking, for example. An etic intake would include the patient’s age of smoking onset and packs smoked per year, and the diagnosis would be ICD-10 code F17.200: Nicotine dependence, unspecified, uncomplicated.

An emic approach would respond to that ICD-10 label with a snort; is cigarette smoking ever uncomplicated?! Because an emic approach looks at things from the patient’s perspective – or, from the inside out, so to speak. An emic intake to evaluate cigarette smoking would include understanding what was happening when a patient started to smoke, the good things that smoking does for the patient (“it calms me down…it distracts me from my pain”), the barriers to quitting and the level of desire to quit. Asking patients questions like these gets to what I like to call “the root of why.” It gets to the bottom of things and can be transformative.

The Importance of Personal Experience

Trauma-informed practice calls for shifting from etic to emic, from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” The kind of trauma I am writing about here is relational, as compared to situational trauma like a car accident or a hurricane. While trauma can occur at any age, it is particularly impactful in childhood, and much of the science generating evidence-based practice stems from the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) studies.

ACEs are common, cumulative and strongly associated with most of the leading causes of death in the U.S., as well as health risk behaviors like smoking, disordered eating and substance abuse. ACEs impact brain development, immune and hormonal systems, and even genetic expression – across the entire lifespan.

Positive events like growing up in a loving home, living in a safe space, and getting good at something counteract ACEs, again across the entire lifespan. In other words, our lived experience becomes our biology.

Walk a Mile in the Patient’s Shoes

That’s why it’s important to understand health concerns from the patient’s perspective. Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that 80 percent of health outcomes are the result of factors other than healthcare. Traumatic experiences and adverse community challenges play a big role in this.

When we take the time to step in the patient’s shoes, we have a better chance at understanding what is driving health outcomes – and how to intervene. After all, the patients are the experts of their own lives!

Affirming patients’ experiences and helping them connect the dots across their lives is healing and places them in the center of the healthcare team. It facilitates relationships that are empowering. It says, loud and clear, “I see you.”

A Favorite Tactic to Consider

Have you ever been on a Media Tour? The Media Tour is one of SPRYTE’s favorite earned media tools. Why? Because Media Tours can be incredibly results-oriented, especially for healthcare and social service providers.

So, what exactly is a Media Tour? A Media Tour is one or more informal meetings with relevant media. Media Tours can be targeted to hyperlocal grassroots outlets, regional broadcast news stations, trade publications and/or national consumer and business media targets. SPRYTE has conducted Media Tours to all types of media.

We suggest and implement Media Tours on behalf of our clients because SPRYTE is engaged to deliver meaningful earned media results. It’s our job!

Here are examples of three Media Tours SPRYTE recommended and conducted recently on behalf of healthcare and social service providers:

CEO Consumer Media Tour to 11 Site Markets

In a series of two-day Media Tours with up to seven meetings per Tour, SPRYTE introduced the Founder and CEO of an entrepreneurial healthcare provider to consumer and business reporters and television news producers in 11 major cities. Many of the meetings immediately led to consumer stories. Best of all, open lines of communications were established for future story pitches and event coverage.

Social Service Agency Executive Director Visits the Business Journal

After introducing the “Head Coach” and Executive Director of a large social service agency to the Executive Editor of the Philadelphia Business Journal, a productive partnership was born. Both were extremely interested in how businesses can help individuals step up and out of poverty. The Journal became a media sponsor of the charity’s annual social justice thought leadership day and a commitment by the Journal to run four op-eds per year by the charity’s Executive Director was made.

Building Interest in an International Conference Coming to Town

To build interest in a global association’s international conference taking place in Philadelphia, its CEO, who had once been a local Congressman, came to town six weeks in advance of the Conference for a Media Tour. All major business and consumer media outlets in the Region agreed to meet with the CEO as part of the Media Tour. Detailed feature stories about his industry in advance of the Conference resulted and that was the goal. Mission accomplished!

Here are some reasons you may want to consider a Media Tour for your organization:

• Face-to-Face Meetings are always better than pitch letters and phone calls when you’re establishing relationships and open lines of communication with the media.
• Media Tours provide an opportunity for a spokesperson to relay key messages to the media to see which ones resonate and are considered newsworthy.
• Reporters and producers have a chance to share with you what angles they’re interested in immediately and in the future.

It’s always a challenge scheduling large blocks of time outside of the office. And meeting with reporters and producers can be intimidating, especially for the inexperienced. But, in our realm as earned media experts, there’s no more productive tried and true tactic than the Media Tour. SPRYTE welcomes the opportunity to help you with your Media Tour, whether your “news” is evergreen or breaking. It could be well worth your while.

Years ago, when visiting client Crossroads Hospice & Palliative Care’s Cincinnati site, I was fortunate enough to also visit fellow Worldcom partner Wordsworth Communications in downtown Cincinnati. As our guest blogger this week, Wordsworth Managing Partner, Bridget Castellini, explains how company culture attracts talent in today’s competitive hiring market.

This article originally appeared in the September 2019 issue of Strategies & Tactics. Reposted with permission from the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

Today’s public relations professionals need to tap into a diverse set of skills in an always-on, unpredictable and fast-paced industry. They need to be strong storytellers, content generators and masterful communicators; possess an impeccable attention to detail; be nimble to quickly and easily shift gears; have the ability to shake it off easily and get back on the horse… the list goes on and on.

Just as we’re evaluating candidates’ skills, they’re carefully evaluating us. They want the agency they select, and the clients they’ll be serving, to be challenging, yet fair and rewarding. They want the opportunity to continue to push themselves to learn and grow in an industry that changes daily.

More importantly, they also want to feel supported and valued in a team-focused environment. They crave work-life balance and flexibility. They want open and honest communication. They want to add value and feel rewarded. They also need a clear picture of what it’s like to work at your shop before they accept the offer.

That’s why our culture is front and center during the interview process. Agency leaders have a big opportunity (to practice what they preach and use public relations) to sell prospective employees on why they should work for you, starting with your culture.

Here are eight ways to use your agency’s culture to attract top talent.

Lead with Culture

Showcase your agency’s mission and vision during the interview process, starting with the job description. When you sit down with candidates, highlight the top five things you do for employees. Share concrete examples of what makes your culture different or special since most companies will tout the “we’re a great place to work” message. Leading with culture shows you place a high value on it.

Give Them a Tour

This may seem like a no-brainer: give candidates a tour. Forego the phone interviews or meeting at a coffee shop. Show them where they would sit. Allow them to picture themselves inside your walls

Use a Team Approach to Interviews

No one wants to meet only with agency leadership during the interview process. They want to meet with the colleagues they’ll be rolling up their sleeves next to. Your team can be your best ambassadors – have candidates talk to team members in different roles. Set up several in-person sessions so they can ask questions in casual, yet structured meetings, hosting them in different meeting rooms so they can get a flavor for what meetings will be like if they take a position at your firm. They’ll get a good idea of what it’s truly like to work within your walls.

Host a Gathering

There’s no better way for talent to get to know you than a low-key, fun setting like a happy hour or informal gathering. We’ve hosted summer happy hours at the agency structured around a theme. One year it was “Camp Wordsworth” and stations were set-up, staffed by our team to meet and greet with attendees and take them through a fun activity.

Showcase Your Team (and Culture) on Social Media

The first places talent will go to check out your agency are your social feeds. Make sure it includes a good balance of life inside the agency. You’ve worked hard to cultivate and nurture your culture, why not show it off on social media?

Find Out Candidates' Strengths

Consider having candidates take the CliftonStrengths assessment to determine their talents in the form of their top five strengths. You can use it as another piece of data to determine if they’d be a good fit for the culture of the company.

Form a Culture Committee

Chances are you offer more perks and flexibility than a ping pong table, an Xbox and free Cokes. Basically, you need to walk the walk and not just talk the talk and have a team dedicated to it. At our agency, we have a culture committee that plans fun activities and outings for holidays, birthdays and everything in between.

Ask Them What They Want

Don’t forget to survey candidates and prospective employees on what they want in a work environment. What are their top requirements?

How are selling your company’s culture to your hires? Drop me a line at bcastellini@wordsworthweb.com

How to Tell Your Organization's Story Through Personnel News

Smart business leaders know that any organization’s greatest asset is its people. Employees are the force that brings mission statements and balance sheets to life. When it comes to telling your story, promoting their successes can make for a most compelling lede.

The classic personnel announcement is one tried and true tactic. Announcing new hires, promotions and awards, and other achievements burnishes your organization’s brand and distinguishes it from your competitors.

Just as importantly, personnel announcements can enhance collegiality and corporate culture by sending a clear message that employees are valued and their accomplishments are worth celebrating. As such, they should be a key element of any internal communications strategy.

Getting Creative

That being said, it can be a bit challenging these days to leverage personnel announcements through earned media. Many media outlets – from local newspapers to national healthcare industry trade publications -- that used to run “Personnel News” and business announcement columns now charge fees to run personnel announcements. The cost can make it prohibitive for non-profits and others with limited marketing budgets to share their news.

That’s when it pays to dig deeper to find interesting story angles that will turn a simple personnel announcement into a bigger story – something we did for client Home Care Associates’ (HCA) announcement of its new CEO, Tatia Cooper. In fact, we wrote a blog post previously about how we wove details of Ms. Cooper’s life and her family’s deep community involvement into our outreach for the announcement, which helped us tell a more meaningful story about HCA that local media outlets truly wanted to cover.

By finding those interesting angles – and leveraging them through an integrated earned, owned and social media campaign – healthcare communicators can make an otherwise straight-forward personnel announcement truly sing.

Putting the Pieces Together

SPRYTE recently was called upon to help a long-standing national client, Crossroads Hospice & Palliative Care, announce two senior leadership promotions. Crossroads is a leading provider of comprehensive hospice services to people with life-limiting illnesses and their caregivers. Headquartered in Tulsa, OK, Crossroads serves patients in their homes and long-term care facilities in 11 sites in seven states in the Midwest and Pennsylvania.

DeAnna Looper, one of Crossroads’ original employees at its founding in 1995, was named Chief Compliance Officer for Carrefour Associates, Crossroads’ management firm. In this newly created role, she oversees all clinical, legal and regulatory compliance operations across all 11 Crossroads sites.

Danny Cox, who joined Crossroads in 2011, advanced to Senior Vice President of Clinical Operations, the role previously held by DeAnna. Having successfully led the complex implementation of a new hospice-specific electronic medical record platform for all 11 Crossroads sites across two time zones, he is now responsible for the enterprise-wide integration of all clinical operations.

Both DeAnna and Danny are nurses by training and nurse educators with more than five decades’ combined experience in healthcare, education and administration. The basics make for an impressive personnel announcement, to be sure. Digging deeper revealed details that strengthen the internal message.

Crossroads is committed to continually innovating and shaping the way end-of-life care is viewed and administered. Having worked their way steadily through numerous positions over the years, building and growing the organization, both DeAnna and Danny are the embodiment of this mission. DeAnna, in particular, started as Crossroads’ first nurse and literally crafted the clinical model from the ground up alongside the founder and CEO.

Elevating these two longtime team members who were instrumental in making Crossroads the hospice leader it is today sent a powerful internal message that the company values the contributions of all employees, finds their achievements newsworthy, and lives its mission statement.

Rollout and Response

True to Crossroads’ promise to put its people first, SPRYTE activated its campaign with a personal message from the CEO to all employees. Across the system, every employee at every level was “first to know” the exciting and important news.

The official announcement was sent to a targeted list of regional business, newspapers and other media outlets, and earned coverage in national hospice industry and nursing trade publications.

DeAnna and Danny were each profiled on Crossroads’ popular blog, where employees, patients and families, the referring physician community and industry colleagues frequently turn for the latest news. Here they learned that Danny first felt his calling to the hospice philosophy of care when his own father was dying and no hospice services were readily available. And when DeAnna isn’t busy sorting through the complexities of hospice regulatory compliance, the lifelong Beatles fan can be found singing loudly and off-key to her grandchildren McCartney, Jett and Jade.

Capping off the campaign, the blogs and other communications were amplified across all of Crossroads’ social media channels, where they engaged an even wider audience.

The Takeaway

For healthcare communicators, the moral of the story is to think creatively. Beneath the simple personnel announcement, there are often stories that bring the corporate mission statement to life. By sharing them, you’re not only burnishing your brand, you’re sending a strong message internally that employees are valued and celebrated.

Transcend the Photo Op with Human-Interest Angles

This week, we're revisiting our blog post about the importance of including heartfelt, human-interest stories when holding media events.

Every organization has media events, and everyone thinks theirs is special, different, or worthy of news coverage. The truth is, journalists have seen many of these happenings before, covered them ad nauseam, and maybe even ignore them altogether.

One way to entice cameras, of course, is creating a really great visual, something that they just can’t live without. But sometimes there’s nothing you can add visually, and some photo ops just don’t get reporters excited because they’ve been there, done that. That’s when it’s helpful to turn to the human story inside of your media event to generate great health system PR.

That party for underprivileged children? Not a big deal to jaded editors, but imagine if one of those kids is reunited with a military parent on leave during the party? We’ve seen these stories time and again, but there’s always interest because of the emotions involved.

Take a deep look at not only WHAT is happening at your media event, but WHO it is happening too. In any group, there’s usually one or two participants for whom the event is most meaningful. If you can find those people, and learn their backstories, you can more easily sell your event, because now it’s not merely a “photo op” but a human interest story.

A Love Story…Broken

Take our health system client’s recent “virtual dementia tour,” for example. This is a recurring opportunity for caregivers and family members to literally walk in the shoes of dementia patients, such as Alzheimer’s sufferers, seeing what they see and experiencing what they feel through special goggles, gloves, headphones and shoe inserts. The virtual dementia tour is provided by a handful of companies around the country, which contract with hospitals, hospice companies, nursing homes and other organizations to deliver the experience to those with an interest.

In our research, we found that TV stations and some newspapers have covered virtual dementia tours when they’ve occurred in other markets, and one or two even covered a prior event in this health system’s service area of Philadelphia. On the one hand, that meant there’s proven interest in the topic among the media. On the other, it’s not particularly new. So how could we excite the media for this latest tour?

Upon learning that one woman signed up for the dementia tour because her husband, a patient at our client’s assisted living facility, had Alzheimer’s and wanted to see what he was going through, we were sold, and we thought we’d be able to entice the media with it too. We were told she’d be happy to talk with a reporter, and even accompany one through the dementia experience for the cameras (within the constricts of what the tour provider allows, for proprietary reasons).

This couple had been married for 65 years, and the husband has been suffering from dementia for the past nine. This was her chance to better understand what goes on inside his head, particularly since he is no longer able to speak. A local television health reporter was intrigued, and she determined early in the process that her story about the virtual dementia tour would be focused on this woman. The reporter even requested still photos of the couple in better times, which the wife was happy to bring along.

Coverage was not only assured, but it was now a highlight of that evening’s newscast. While most photo ops might, at best, merit a 45-second voiceover, now that this was about people, rather than a high-tech, visual event, the result was a nearly three-minute feature story.

Build People into your Media Event Planning

When planning outreach for your media event, build into your plans the people who will be attending. Attempt to learn the following:

• What motivates them to be there?
• Why is this important to them?
• What is their “backstory” as it relates to this event?
• What will happen to them after the event, or how will things be different?

Not everyone’s going to have a relevant story, let alone one that might be newsworthy, so you might have to speak with several people, or staff or organizers who know some of them personally. But you’ll find it’s usually worth the effort.

It’s academic to say that all news is about people, but if you have a human face and a great story to complement an otherwise ordinary activity, your event becomes much more than an event.

A Veteran’s Last Flight Brightens a Labor Day News Cycle

In honor of Labor Day, we're resharing our blog post about how telling heartfelt stories – like Crossroads Hospice’s special “Gift of a Day” event for a beloved veteran – is one of the best ways an organization can connect with the media.

For many professional communicators, using some kind of angle to tie your message to an upcoming holiday probably comes almost as easily as falling off a bar stool.

Sometimes, however, the story is so timeless that it will transcend the routine patter that often guides holiday-related earned media pitches.

A Case in Point

One of our national clients, Crossroads Hospice & Palliative Care, has created a wonderful patient-focused  program called “Gift of a Day.” The premise is fairly simple. A local social worker or volunteer coordinator asks a hospice patient what their idea of a perfect day would look like. Then they try to make it happen.

Late last summer, over Labor Day weekend, Crossroads staff working out of the eastern Kansas regional office (based in Lenexa), arranged for a very special Gift of a Day for a patient, a military veteran who had served his country through three wars.

The gift involved a 91-year-old local Crossroads patient from Ottawa, KS, who had served as a pilot in the U.S. Navy during World War II (where he also served on the USS Beatty), then another 23 years in the U.S. Air Force Reserves amidst the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Honoring a Beloved Veteran

His love of airplanes and flying had never ebbed. His last request – to take to the air one more time and have the chance to fly over Kansas’ colorful scenery and gaze down upon his beloved home state – would be a dream come true.

The staff at Crossroads was determined to make it happen. To help make it a reality, they reached out to the Commemorative Air Force, Heart of America Wing, which is based at the nearby New Center Airport of Olathe, KS (the old Olathe Naval Air Station).

It was a touching moment when the hospice patient was introduced to his special chariot for the day – an authentic vintage biplane, a PT-13 Kaydet, an iconic American training aircraft from World War II. In fact, it brought tears to his eyes.

But how would it play for the media? Remember, it was Labor Day weekend. Most stations were down to skeleton crews. And the overriding theme for the weekend would naturally be demonstrations, parades and other tributes to the American labor movement.

Family, Friends and Media

Not to worry. Even in suburban Kansas City, in the midst of rural fields about an hour away from local TV stations, the story of a final tribute to a proud veteran who had served his country through three wars was too alluring to resist.

The hospice patient’s daughter and family friends surrounded him as he was strapped into his seat. A local Fox4KC news crew captured the fun as the patient bantered with the pilot and talked about his memories serving in the Navy and Air Force before taking off into the blue Kansas skies.

The story and the visuals proved irresistible. Not only did the story make the local Kansas City evening news cast, it soon went national, and was picked up by Fox News national programming as well as CNN, Accu-Weather and a host of other news sites across the nation.

All told, this little “feel good” story out of suburban Kansas City was picked up by more than 70 media outlets across the U.S.and earned more than 63.8 million individual impressions.

The Moral

Just because you’re timing happens to be attuned to a specific holiday, doesn’t mean you should bend over backwards to try to make some obscure connection. People enjoy stories that take them back to happier times.

Stories that honor veterans and patriotic service are almost always sure-fire ways for winning hearts, minds, and earned media.