This week, Blue State Digital and the Coalition to Protect America’s Health Care took home two top honors in the inaugural Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Awards presented by Modern Healthcare and Advertising Age:
Digital Campaign of the Year, Advocacy: Gold
Social Media Campaign of the Year, Advocacy: Silver
The Coalition was recognized for the digital component of its campaign to avert a series of devastating federal funding cuts to hospital patient care. We worked with the Coalition to increase awareness and forge a digital strategy aimed at activating a community around imminent threats to hospitals nationally.
Our work has involved a simple question: Hospitals provide life-saving care and jobs to millions of Americans, but who looks out for the hospitals?
We started by redesigning and rebuilding the Coalition’s website to make a stronger, clearer case for saving hospitals.
To build community, we ran a multi-channel campaign targeting health care workers, patients, and politically engaged advocates. Email and social media educated these new supporters, and asked them to take incrementally higher barrier actions, culminating in outreach to their members of Congress.
Within a year of transitioning to digital advocacy, the Coalition had amassed hundreds of thousands of supporters, and generated more than 358,000 messages and 3,000 phone calls to Congress. These efforts led to a major win in March 2014, when billions in cuts to federal hospital funding were averted.
We recently partnered with the Coalition on a campaign called Hospital Heroes, which documents the people and patients in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Narrated in the voice of a NICU nurse, the video series has helped draw attention to the hospital workers and patients directly impacted by potential funding cuts—in an extremely poignant, dynamic way.
The goal of the Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Awards program is to recognize “responsible communications that makes a difference.” We couldn’t be more thrilled to take home an award that honors both our work and a partnership that’s meant so much to us.