Unequal access to food, housing, and healthcare is killing people in this country. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) aims to build a culture of health in the United States that not only understands but addresses these social factors. RWJF identified nurses — the largest and most trusted segment of America’s healthcare workforce — as a critical audience and participant in the fight for overcoming these injustices. Nurses from diverse backgrounds are uniquely qualified, but barriers prevent them from doing this work — including discrimination and lack of accessible resources.
Nurses were in an evolutionary period in 2019. Burned out, short-staffed and overworked, they had no idea a pandemic was about to hit. The healthcare system struggled with how to help communities overcome unjust social factors affecting health. Nurses therefore needed a community — and a rallying cry — in the fight for health equity. They need a platform where they can be inspired and enabled with resources for action.
This was a big challenge for two reasons. First, RWJF was a largely unknown brand to general, front-line nurses. And second, connecting with nurses is notoriously difficult, as specialization has required increasingly targeted and tailored messages that align with nurses’ individual motivations. Some nurses were engaged on these issues, but there was not a platform exclusively for nurses that prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion conversations.
SHIFT therefore engages diverse nurses around how to fight for health equity through written and multimedia storytelling across social, written, and multimedia channels made for them.
To help nurses become advocates, we had to enable them with resources on one of the most powerful tools to change culture and spread ideas: social media. So SHIFT aims to break down academic and health equity resources into social content that is just as engaging as more light-hearted and fun nurse content. Each month, the SHIFT team brainstorms to curate content around health equity in nursing and balances these heavy topics with fun, topical trends.
Content features in 2023 included school gun violence and the roles school nurses play in keeping students safe and healthy, the history of Indigenous nurses’ approaches to healing as well as content that injects the snark and humor essential to nurse culture, such as “Nurse Math” and the holiday movie generator for nurses.
A diverse nursing workforce is essential to providing more equitable healthcare. However, nursing leadership and the nursing field itself is predominantly white women. Therefore, we aimed for a majority of our content to elevate issues and voices of nurses minoritized because of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation, in order to help shift nurses’ self-image of who can lead this field.
We also use social channels to promote other SHIFT content (like the documentary) and live events. The SHIFT team is intentional about ensuring it remains a safe space for nurses to share their stories, that it amplifies health equity thought leaders — and, most importantly, that it remains an avenue to provide solutions for how nurses in various environments (clinic, hospital, educational, etc.) can be part of systemic positive change in nursing and, ultimately, in healthcare.
Foundational to our plan was a monthly social media calendar that incorporated organic and paid posts across Meta. The content was a mixture between static,image-based posts and carousels and Reels and short videos. Building on that community, when we launched our documentary “Who Cares: A Nurse’s Fight for Equity,” we emphasized Reels and short clips from the film to drive interest and engagement around the issues the film discusses, as well as traffic to watch the full documentary.
RWJF, in collaboration with National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, conducted a nationwide survey in 2022 to determine how racism and discrimination are affecting nurses. The work revealed serious, systemic issues
Revive leveraged the timing of May 2023 being National Nurses Month to release the findings through an exclusive story with a health equity reporter at STAT News. As a result of this comprehensive story, multiple news outlets and nursing organizations wanted to know more about this research and what was being done to address equity in nursing.
Revive spent the last six months of 2023 (May - December) packaging the findings from the RWJF/NORC research alongside helpful solutions and resources on SHIFT social channels. We presented this content through beautiful art direction that both educates and entertains.
Across our channels, we aimed to create a healing, restorative, and refreshing space that’s full of vibrant, custom art in a healthcare content space so often void of color, energy, diversity, or personality.
By creating emotionally engaging and motivational content about issues that matter to nurses, SHIFT has connected profoundly with its community. In 2023, SHIFT continues to prove its impact by outperforming benchmark engagement rates compared to similar advocacy brands across all post categories while also staying true to a core mission to amplify minority voices.
SHIFT social posts outperformed the benchmark engagement rate across all post categories. Social posts featuring health equity resources outperformed the industry benchmark by 3.7 times showing that SHIFT’s public engagement rate is well above that of other accounts producing content in the diversity, equity, & inclusion space across all post categories.
Over a third of SHIFT’s social content amplifies minoritized voices with posts outperforming the industry benchmark 7 times. Social posts featuring content from the RWJF/NORC Racism Survey outperform the industry benchmark by over 14X. Over a third of SHIFT’s social content amplifies minoritized voices. These resources are shared in a variety of ways across social channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Posts amplifying minoritized voices outperform the industry benchmark by 7X.
SHIFT’s public engagement rate is well above that of other accounts producing content in the diversity, equity & inclusion space across all post categories.
