Building Physician Practices: Success Stories

For more than two decades we’ve worked with physicians to build their practices, and this experience has helped us create a formula for driving patients to a new practice—which accelerates the revenue stream needed to sustain them. Using our proprietary methods, we’ve been able to track up to 57 new patients per month which can be linked back to a very modest investment in advertising. One practice resulted in a 25% increase in hospital surgical cases—just two months after the campaign was launched. (We know this because this practice was already in business when they hired us, and the volumes went up after the campaign launched.)

It’s good to use a mix of advertising media—and fine-tuning this over the years has helped us devise an optimal mix for launching a physician practice. The best results occur:

• Where there’s sufficient market demand for the specialty
• When the physicians have good patient relationships
• When the physicians and hospital have a strong partnership

Even without this, it’s possible to accelerate patient volumes through marketing—but when all of variables above align, the growth can be stunning.

Eight Reasons to Celebrate Your Company’s Anniversaries

CMBell Company was in Los Angeles at White Memorial Medical Center last week to begin work on the planning for their Centennial

A company anniversary provides an opportunity to breathe new life into your organization—to offer a kind of oasis in the press of daily work. A strategically planned anniversary celebration can:

1. Recognize the people who make your success possible
2. Deepen bonds with your community, customers and staff
3. Inspire deeper engagement
4. Infuse the workplace with meaning
5. Shift internal focus from problems to achievements
6. Reinforce your culture, mission and values
7. Attract positive press
8. Provide a foundation for casting vision for the future

There’s no rule about which anniversaries you should celebrate. Whether it’s f a 15th (ours, next year), a 20th, or a 100th, these occasions provide valuable time for reflection and celebration—both of which yield subtle but important fruits in the work place.

Communications Can Restore Sense of Purpose and Meaning to the Workforce

How can we recognize our volunteers? That was the question posed by St. Anthony North Hospital as they prepared to launch their 40-year anniversary campaign.

We assembled this simple animation pairing words and photos to respond to their request, and love the magical qualities represented by these compelling still images. Hiring one of our partner photographers in Colorado, we commissioned her to tell a visual story that captures the generous spirit of these volunteers. Within a week, we had pulled this together, designing it in a way that allows it to be used not only for the anniversary, but for recruiting and recognizing volunteers in the future.

Communicators build culture by the words and images they use—by the stories they tell. This is one of the areas I find most rewarding in our work. It's easy to focus on new products, services and programs, because of their news value. But we all need to remember how important it is to take time to reinforce behaviors that are essential to your corporate culture.

Here are ways to use an animation like this:

• Post it on your Web site
• Post it on your You Tube site
• Show it in orientation, or during the recruiting process
• Show it at events
• Post it on Facebook and other social media sites
• Show it on in-house monitors or TV channels
• Distribute links to it via email

We often find that reminding people of the deeper reasons they chose their profession pays off in significant ways for companies—restoring a bit of soul to the corporate world.

What kind of culture-building communications have you seen lately that worked?

Spine Billboard Wins Gold Aster Award

We just learned that the successful “Get your back back. In Walla Walla.” outdoor board we developed with Providence St. Mary Medical Center Regional Spine Center has received a Gold Award from the Aster Awards Competition which honors excellence in medical marketing.

The Aster Awards, one of the largest national competitions of its kind, received approximately 3,000 entries from the United States, Canada and South America.  Participant’s entries competed against similar-sized organizations in their category.

Gold Awards reflect a score that ranks the creative work in the top 5% of entries submitted. Judging criteria includes creativity, layout and design, functionality, message effectiveness, production quality and overall appeal.

Here are a few of the distinctive attributes of this billboard that contribute to its success:

• Short, seven-word headline works with image to create instant understanding that this is an ad for relief of back pain.
• Alliteration in the headline makes it memorable.
• Use of the city’s name connects with local readers, and makes it clear to regional readers that the service is in Walla Walla.
• Vivid colors tie in with the center’s corporate colors, but are also vibrant and suggest health.

Hospital Anniversary Campaign Uses Video to Tell the Story

We produced a series of mini-videos for St. Anthony North Hospital's 40-Year Anniversary campaign—all of which are posted on their Web site, their You Tube channel and their Facebook pages. Each of the personal interviews tells a piece of their story—what the hospital means to its community, its distinctive mission and its vision for the future.

 

Quality videos are getting more cost-effective to produce. This, coupled with the the pervasive consumer appetite for video, should make it a part of any significant campaign.

 

What are your reactions to this campaign? Do you think St. Anthony North's message was effectively communicated to the community? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

Hospital Anniversary Campaign: Entertain, Celebrate and Communicate with Video

We departed from the more serious style of the anniversary campaign interviews (which will post next Monday) to produce something fun that showcases the hospital employees, who were happily cooperative with some of our creative directing. We loved being able to capture the wonderful spirit of the people at St. Anthony Hospital North, and think this video not only does that, but can help generate internal enthusiasm for this celebration.

 

Whenever a production can be entertaining, it increases its chance of being distributed virally. While this one will be posted on their web site, You Tube channel and Facebook page, we hope viewers will also send their friends links to the video.

 

Check back next week for the final installment of this campaign: testimonial videos featuring the leaders of St. Anthony North.

Hospital Anniversary Campaign: Outdoor Advertising

 

 

This week we're following the launch of a hospital anniversary campaign for our client, St. Anthony North Hospital in North Metro Denver. Today we're featuring their outdoor elements. Outdoor advertising is a good supporting media, and although it can't tell the full story, it can reinforce the key messages. Creatively speaking, it is the hardest to develop because the message must be so short in order to be read quickly.

See how the transit and outdoor ads above support the hospital's broader messages for their 40-year anniversary campaign.

Check back tomorrow to view the entertaining employee video for this campaign, and see how to engage your own workforce in your organization's strategic messages.

Hospital Anniversary Campaign Incorporates Kinetic Typography

Kinetic typography is a new way of telling your story. It’s essentially a mini-ad that can be used in a variety of ways. Here’s how St. Anthony Hospital North used it as part of their 40-year anniversary campaign:

• Posted on their You Tube Channel
• Posting it on Facebook
• Posting it on their hospital Web site
• Sending links virally—to employees, physicians, donors and key stakeholders

Click the links below to see some of our other kinetic typography projects:

• Dimensions Pain Management 
• Independent Colleges of Washington

And check out some of the other ways that companies are using animation: 

• Good Magazine Infographics 
• (Starbucks)Red Campaign 
• Starbucks Tribute Days 

Check back tomorrow to see our outdoor advertising solutions for this campaign. 

Hospital Anniversary Campaign: Mall Displays and Exterior Banner

If you joined us yesterday, you saw the evolution of the icon for our client's 40-year anniversary that is launching this week in Colorado. Here's the winning campaign icon; you can see how it was applied in the designs below.

For the mall displays, we decided to break the rules that suggest using 7-10 words on outdoor advertising. We didn't intend for viewers to read every word on the ad, but instead to walk away with an overall impression of how much St. Anthony does in partnership with its community. 

 

Note that on the bottom of the display, you'll see a QR code. Viewers can use a smart phone app to scan the code, which takes them to a special 40-year animation (check back later this week to view the animation, or if you click to enlarge the ad you can scan it now). The print ad echoes this design and also features the QR code.

 

What do you think. Did we meet the goal?

 

Print Ad

 

Mall Display

 

As a part of the overall media buy, we like to use a client's facility to communicate, since it's a cost-effective way to reach people already interested in the organization. There are no media buy fees, and it reinforces the campaign message with the staff, who are important advocates. Similar interior banners on stands are located in the two main entrances of the hospital.

 

Exterior Banner

 

Check back tomorrow to see what we developed as part of their social media campaign.

Case Study: The Evolution of an Icon for a Hospital Anniversary Campaign

What's a 40-year anniversary about? For St. Anthony North Hospital in Denver, Colo., it is an opportunity to celebrate milestones, honor their staff, confirm their distinctive role and cast a vision for the future.

 

A combination of outdoor, print and social media provided the platform for communicating their contributions to and partnership with their community. The message—We: You, me and St. Anthony North, Side by side for 40 years—celebrated the past as a shared achievement and staked out their independence as a separate entity from their founding hospital,while still honoring their shared history.

 

For their campaign which is launching this week, the client wanted an icon that would appear on the various campaign pieces to create continuity. Before we began working on the icon, we established these goals:

1. Must have 40 in it, to clarify the anniversary aspect of the message
2. Must differentiate the hospital from its founding facility, which has a similar name
3. Must be flexible for use in many types of application
4. Must be simple
5. Had to work with the logo and corporate graphic standards

Here's our original idea shown on a sample ad.

 

 

Since the hospital is in Colorado, the first icon was created using rocks—reinforcing this region's beautiful natural resources. However, after gathering feedback, some felt this too abstract, so we went back to the drawing board and came up with some new icons. 

 

  

 

 

Which one is your favorite icon? Check back next week to see which icon the client chose—and to see a different campaign element featured each day, including the light-hearted employee video.