Campaign: The Making of an ICU Nurse
Winner: Massachusetts General Hospital, Patient Care Services
Gone are the days where the nursing profession was best illustrated by white paper hats and stockings. The problem is that many people don't know it and remain fixated
on long-outdated stereotypes, and the profession has suffered accordingly. A nursing shortage plagued the industry, and Massachusetts General Hospital executives were
certain that it was in large part due to the profession's image problem - a problem they set out to rectify through aggressive and authentic outreach efforts to position
nurses as career-oriented, mature, intelligent professionals who were essential to the healthcare industry.
Authentic was the key word of the PR media outreach initiative. The Massachusetts General Hospital communications team didn't want to rush a quick handful of
media hits that barely scraped the surface of the nursing practices; specifically, Intensive Care Unit nurses. Instead, they opted for a long-term program that would
communicate the realities of the profession through media invitations to shadow nurses in the trenches. It was a risky proposition, considering the delicate nature of
healthcare, but the PR team took all measures necessary to ensure a success from the onset of the initiative.
They began by identifying two nurses who embodied a nurse's fast-acting, critical-thinking character and then media trained them to tell their compelling story. Second,
the team did what many communications executives still fail to do when conducting media relations: They identified the most appropriate journalist for the story and pitched
him with a personal, in-depth proposal.
The result? The targeted journalist - Boston Globe health/science reporter Scott Allen - jumped on the story. By letting Allen interact directly with the nurses,
the relationship continued for a year and resulted in a four-part, front-page series titled: "Critical Care: The Making of an ICU Nurse." It was a full eight-page spread
with 18 color photographs and 13,500 words.
The PR executives' patience paid off many times over, as the initiative delivered impressive - and measurable - results: Applications for the winter session doubled from
previous years, providing a large pool of talent from which to hire the best candidates. More recently, the department received nearly 600 applications for only five
vacancies, and a corporate donor signed on to underwrite the costs of reprinting and distributing the full series to high school science teachers and nursing schools
nationwide.
Through very targeted and strategic media outreach, the PR program achieved its individual goal, but it also made strides in correcting a problem that has been centuries
in the making.
Honorable Mentions
The UJA-Federation of New York and its network agencies had a wonderful opportunity to participate in a three-month campaign inspiring readers of The New York Times
to donate to the most vulnerable and poor in the city through a series of stories by a variety of organizations. The nonprofit needed to find ways to persuade
vulnerable people to share their stories, report and factcheck them and boil down 15 acceptable stories from the 50 they received. The team set strategies, created a How-To
Guide to help agencies and social workers decide which cases to focus on, coordinated the editorial team to keep the momentum going, fostered friendly competition among
team members, and kept the entire team advised of its progress with electronic links. The New York Times published 15 of the UJA-Federation's stories with an ad
equivalency of $40,000 per story.
How do you promote the U.S. Postal Service using a holiday national public relations/media outreach program? You start with a cookie. Postcards were sent to more than
1,300 reporters across the country in a range of media every week. But before the first themed postcard arrived, each reporter received a press kit in the form of a
Priority Mail box containing a cookie, a letter explaining the campaign, and a "recipe box" for all the postcards they would receive. The postcards supported products or
information from the USPS, with images from the 2005 Holiday Shipping and Mailing Guide and promo messages. More than 2,000 stories reached a combined audience of
132,535,000 people, with an ad value equivalency of $2.8 million. And the American public learned everything it wanted to know about holiday mailing and shipping - but was
afraid to ask.
When the Colorado State University (and partners that included NASA and the Canadian Space Agency) launched satellite radar CloudSat 438 miles above the Earth in April
2006, it needed a whole other stratosphere of media coverage. To achieve this, the PR team dubbed April 11th "Media Day" and followed up with press releases, information
from a panel of experts and press conferences to highlight the University's key role in the launch. The result: CloudSat generated tons of media attention, much of which
included the University as a key focus.
Thanks to celebrity spokespeople like Michael J. Fox, movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease have experienced greater media exposure in recent years, and the WE
MOVE organization continues to promote the message of much-needed early diagnoses and treatment. The campaign leaders appealed to the media by working with celebrity
patients, establishing an annual Movement Disorders Awareness Month through a Congressional proclamation, and disseminating a battery of video and audio news releases that
feature neurologists and patients. Their efforts generated more than 220 million media impressions, thereby raising awareness of disorders that affect a staggering 40
million Americans.