Virtual Call to Action Rallies Community Support

Garnering community support can be a difficult task for hospital marketers—it's often hard to track, tricky to maintain, and is considered a soft metric by many CEOs. But when it comes to Certificate of Need applications, community relations take on a new, vital life. One Illinois health system's ongoing CON campaign has sparked overwhelming support in an underserved community with strategies any hospital marketer can learn from.

Two-hospital system Centegra filed a CON earlier this year to build a 128-bed hospital in the small northern Illinois town of Huntley, right around the time Mercy Health Care, a three-hospital system, filed a CON to build a hospital in nearby Crystal Lake. With a future hospital on the line, Centegra marketers wasted no time creating a community awareness campaign.

The campaign started out much like CON efforts used by other healthcare marketers. Centegra solicited volunteers to make cold phone calls informing community members about the organization's plan for a Huntley hospital. Marketers also made lawn signs available for residents who wished to publicly declare their support.

What sets this campaign apart from many like it is that Centegra marketers took the campaign online early on. A dedicated website makes a succinct and engaging argument for a Huntley hospital.

The site is home to eight "Our Community, Our Hospital" videos featuring Huntley residents, from businessmen to working moms to a former mayor, who each tell about a positive experience they've had with Centegra and explain why a hospital would benefit the community.

"Centegra has been very, very good to my family," says local resident Eileen Breitzke in one of the video messages. "My husband was diagnosed with brain cancer. Everyone went above and beyond and we just felt very, very comfortable there. I loved the doctors at Centegra."

The Huntley mayor has even recorded a video sharing a story about his own family and the need to have a hospital nearby. Each of the eight online videos has been turned into TV spots, which are also available on the microsite, along with support letters written by the video subjects.

"We've gotten such great stories and people asking what they can do to help so we started giving them a way to tell their stories," Susan Milford, Centegra's senior vice president of strategic marketing and planning and wellness services, told a local newspaper.

The website also contains basic information and highlights about the proposed hospital and suggestions on ways community members can get involved, including writing a letter of support, sharing about the cause on other social networks, opting in to receive email updates about the project, and displaying a sign on their yard.

A call to action like this is critical to any successful community relations campaign. Not only does the call to action give residents an easy way to support the cause, but it gives marketers hard metrics to track and report back to leadership. And every marketer knows the value of an opt-in email subscriber.

As a result of these calls to action, Centegra has cultivated many local volunteers, who will likely become their best brand activists if the CON is successful and the hospital is built. More than 100 households are displaying lawn signs, and many residents have helped out making cold calls.

 "We are hoping to be able to show the [state] board that not only does this project meet their criteria but also there is a lot of community support for this people, people who believe it is needed," Milford told the local newspaper.

Though Centegra doesn't go before the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board until early December—the same day Mercy presents its case—its campaign has already achieved success in rallying the Huntley community. And should Centegra receive permission to build the hospital, its marketers have created countless future brand advocates who had a hand in helping the hospital become a reality.

If Centegra is smart, it will continue this community support campaign through the construction process so residents will have a favorable impression of the organization before it even opens its doors. And that will be a solid foundation on which to launch future strategic marketing campaigns.