A NICU that's been caring for infants for more than 40 years is the focal point of a hospital fundraising campaign featuring stories of its tiniest and most clinically fragile patients.
Crouse Hospital doesn't typically market its Baker Regional Neonatal Intensive Care Unit's services. It doesn't need to.
The Syracuse, NY, NICU is a New York State-designated regional referral center for the care of premature and critically ill infants, treating more than 1,000 infants each year from a 14-county area.
"Because of our long-standing leadership in this service line, and because no competing facility exists in the defined geographic region, Crouse does not need to actively market the service—it essentially markets itself," says Bob Allen, vice president of communications and government affairs for the 506-bed hospital.
The NICU's level of market saturation has resulted in it caring for patients for 40 years, an accomplishment Crouse leadership decided to celebrate with an ad campaign.
The goal of the campaign was twofold: marketers wanted to raise awareness for the department and its clinicians, and to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive hospital fundraising campaign, a piece of which will include the NICU.
"The current 57-bassinet unit was opened in 1999 and is not optimally configured for today's care delivery standards," Allen says. "The hospital's goal is to expand the existing unit, while updating and incorporating the latest technological and infant-care advances, including private, individualized treatment rooms."
An Untapped Well of Patient Stories
When conceptualizing the campaign, marketers began with a simple premise of telling patients' stories. Once they began soliciting stories they found the process was easy, thanks to the Baker Regional NICU's high number of successful outcomes.
"Working with our ad agency, [Syracuse-based Eric Mower & Associates] we developed an overall theme for the campaign—Crouse Little Fighters Club—that resonated with us because, regardless of the outcome, NICU infants—the most clinically fragile of patients—are, in fact, all little fighters," Allen says.
The campaign's first "round" of Little Fighters included former Crouse preemies and critically ill patients who are today healthy, thriving individuals. They include a 21-year-old star lacrosse player who spent 16 harrowing weeks in the NICU, a high-school football standout whose mother didn't think she'd ever be able to bring her son home, and a Crouse employee who praises the life-saving care her son received in the NICU.
The effort also featured two Crouse NICU nurses—one of whom was a patient in the NICU 31 years ago and who grew up to become a NICU nurse at Crouse, working side-by-side with the same nurse who cared for her all those years ago, Allen says.
Little Fighters, Big Impact
The Little Fighters campaign launched in September 2015 and included a mix of traditional media—print, radio, and outdoor—along with digital and social media.
"We knew from the beginning that this campaign was tailor-made for storytelling in the digital sphere, particularly through the use of social media," says Cheryl Abrams, director of communications and digital media. "We used traditional media in tandem with the hospital's social media platforms, particularly Facebook, to invite families who had an experience in the Crouse NICU to submit their stories."
Marketers created videos featuring our former NICU patients and their family members sharing their unscripted—and often very emotional—stories. They also created a landing page to both serve as a repository for the videos and provide people with an opportunity to submit their own story, which are displayed on the site.
The landing page also includes a link for people to donate to the campaign online. Since September, it has received more than 5,000 pageviews.
"From a social media standpoint, it's become quite apparent that anything to do with the NICU resonates significantly with those who engage with us on social, which we anticipated, although the level of that engagement has been significant," Allen says. "Little Fighters stories posted on our Facebook page, for example, generate anywhere from 200 to 400 'likes' per post."
Crouse is also using its Twitter and Facebook accounts to push out Little Fighters stories and solicit additional stories, which are then featured on the website landing page. Particularly poignant or compelling stories are selected as Little Fighters "features."
Fundraising Groundwork
While Crouse's formal fundraising campaign won't launch until September, the hospital has already raised more than $40,000 just from the initial awareness and storytelling campaign. Some of the donations have been generated through the sale of Little Fighters Club boxing glove keychains, which are sold in the hospital and at community events for $5 each.
"From a fundraising standpoint, our primary goal in phase one of this effort was to create a level of awareness for the NICU and the services it provides that would help pave the way for potential giving opportunities later in 2016," Allen says. "From a qualitative standpoint, the feedback received to date—not only internally from staff, but also externally from the community—has been extremely positive."
In the year ahead, marketers will continue to emphasize the use of social media to solicit compelling NICU stories from family members and staff. They have their eye on one former patient in particular—a star goalie for a major league hockey team who spent the first weeks of his life as a "preemie" in the Crouse NICU.
Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.