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"Hope. Care. Cure." Success

 |  By HealthLeaders Media Staff  
   August 26, 2009

The smirking, ruddy-faced boy featured in one of Seattle Children's Hospitals "Hope. Care. Cure." campaign's print ads doesn't look like he suffers from mitochondrial disease—and that's the point. The hospital's rebranding campaign used patients, families, physicians, nurses, staff, and volunteers to spread the word about its quality of care, foundation, and research.

"We wanted to create a campaign that that would help us enhance our national presence," says Katharine Fitzgerald, Seattle Children's director of advertising and partnerships. "And we wanted something that honored the 101-year history that we have here in the Pacific Northwest."

The campaign launched in April and includes TV, radio, outdoor, print, and online elements and ran in Washington, Idaho, and parts of Alaska. It is scheduled to run through 2010.

The Seattle Children's marketing team worked with local ad agency Copacino + Fujikado to choose patients, staff, and volunteers to include in the campaign.

"Since the campaign was based on storytelling, we wanted patients that had a great story and a willingness to tell that story," Fitzgerald says. "We wanted a patient that could talk about how it's important that we provide uncompensated care, we wanted a patient who had benefited from research here, and we wanted a patient who could benefit from our clinical care."

Each ad features one word from the "Hope. Care. Cure." tagline and tells a story that exemplifies its corresponding principle.

"The 'Hope. Care. Cure.' anthem really represents and ties together the three peer entities for our organization," Fitzgerald says. "Seattle Children's is a hospital, a foundation, and a research institute so the campaign relates back to those three entities."

Since the campaign launched, Seattle Children's has heard a good amount of positive feedback, she says. It has also seen an increase in traffic to its Web site and has received high awareness scores for the campaign in statewide polls.

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