Together, public policy and healthcare are powerful tools for driving change. Social service organizations and healthcare providers might come at their efforts from different places—whether it’s a moral issue or a financial one—but the goal is the same: to create the conditions where everyone has an equal chance to live their healthiest life.
Increasingly, we’re seeing nonprofits and large medical systems address the social determinants of health (SDOH), which the CDC defines as the “conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age.” Those factors have been shown to have greater impact on someone’s health than genetics or access to healthcare.
This emphasis means that healthcare marketers are taking on campaigns to keep people well in addition to those that promote their organization’s services. Marketing can be a force for advocacy and behavior change.
Marketing designed to influence a community’s health are layered and complex, targeting multiple audiences. Let’s look at the challenges and appropriate messaging for each group.
Both large medical systems and grassroots nonprofits have realized—and agreed—that the way to produce better quality of life, improve health outcomes, and lower health care costs is to move upstream to address the root causes of disease.
This will become increasingly important as the healthcare industry pivots away from a fee-for-service compensation system that reimburses providers for each service performed to a value-based care system where, basically, providers are given a pot of money to care for a specific population of patients. Under that scenario, keeping people well and out of hospitals where costs are highest is the goal and to reach that goal addressing SDOH is critical.
In addition, the Affordable Care Act requires that nonprofits and community hospitals regularly develop a Community Health Needs Assessment, which, as it sounds, reports on the mental and physical health needs of the regions they serve and provides a plan to address them.
Third, as always, providers must continue to pay attention to what’s happening in their communities and respond to meet urgent needs. For example, if there’s an uptick in flu cases locally, a hospital system or large practice might run a seasonal awareness campaign encouraging people to get vaccinated.
Communicating to individuals about quality of life issues, local health needs, and emergency alerts falls to your marketing team. Behavior-change campaigns like these take strategic messaging—because nobody likes being told what to do. Marketing in this space needs to speak with your audiences in ways that are motivating and engaging and relatable. While a clever tagline on a billboard or online ad might grab attention, blog content and personal stories can help people understand how making a change can benefit them directly.
Shifting behavior takes compassion and education and content must be about the individuals you’re addressing and why they should care. In fact, we think that this kind of messaging has to be more than empathetic—it has to truly be from their perspective. Go beyond the “should”—one or two steps deeper – to help them understand what this change actually can mean in their lives. Not just that you’ll feel better, but, for example, because of your efforts you’ll spend more time playing with your grandchildren.
A campaign we created to encourage vaccinations during the height of the Covid pandemic shows the power of communicating directly with people to address public health. We collaborated with five regional senior service agencies to convince older, rural adults to get their Covid vaccines. The messaging addressed key obstacles these folks had in accessing medical care and convinced them it was free and easy to get vaccinated.
Because it focuses on health and positive outcomes for the people our organizations serve, healthcare marketing can be very impactful when it comes to influencing state and local political leaders, community advocates, decision-makers, and other influencers. Our work educates, builds trust, and tells human stories—all powerful tools for persuading stakeholders to take action on a public health or regulatory issue.
As we’re working to encourage change among individuals, those real life stories and evidence can instill empathy and mobilize the broader public to support those policy changes. Campaigns that highlight community-led solutions or grassroots efforts can inspire action and encourage local and national policymakers to prioritize these issues. Marketing that highlights successful models and best practices can serve as a blueprint for policy change.
And, in looking more upstream, collaboration among healthcare organizations, community-based nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies can be an effective means, and may be necessary in some instances, to reach diverse stakeholders and affect the desired impact.
For example, our team worked with a coalition of nonprofits and business organizations in Burlington, VT, to address perceptions that the city was unsafe and unwelcoming. The
“Small Acts of Community” initiative created a rallying cry for the city and its surrounding communities. A website, social media campaign, and tools for individuals and groups encouraged people to do small acts of kindness in their communities and to share their acts on the website.
Even the largest healthcare organization can’t solve community problems on its own. Healthcare takes partnerships — among practitioners, nonprofits, advocates, and experts. These might look like referral arrangements, shared-service partnerships, or care coordination plans where patients are seamlessly transferred from one organization to another for care to address health and wellness.
Someone with diabetes might have regular appointments with a primary care physician, for example, and also access dietary coaching from an independent nutritionist, SNAP benefits and cooking tips administered by a local food bank, and stress management from a mental health nonprofit. Marketing campaigns work to tie all these resources together so that the public is aware that coordinated services exist and understands how to access them.
It might sound counterintuitive, but increasingly healthcare marketing is about keeping people well —out of the hospital and out of the emergency department. It’s not that organizations seek to avoid providing care, but instead they’re helping people live more healthfully so providers can deliver services more effectively. And messaging designed to improve population health as a whole is more integrated across marketing campaigns.
Our team has a deep interest in helping healthcare clients address SDOH by changing community behavior to produce healthier lives. Let’s talk about how we can work together.
Tenth Crow Creative is a brand marketing agency that creates, aligns, and promotes messaging for health and wellness organizations. Through insightful branding, engaging design and compelling marketing campaigns, we help these essential organizations find their identities and effectively communicate with their stakeholders so they can fulfill their missions.
