The idea behind the Day in the Life photo essay series was borne from a wish to deliver fresh new content for NYC Health + Hospitals’ internal e-newsletter, the Insider.
Day in the Life’s origin story
In February 2024, NYC Health + Hospitals Central Office launched a redesigned Insider internal/intranet e-newsletter powered by Microsoft’s SharePoint content management system.
This was a monumental production shift from our previous internal e-newsletter format where articles and content were designed and delivered as PDFs.
For the redesign, we wanted to develop new and engaging content formats beyond the standard news article and it all had to synchronize with the six new content buckets that would need their own supply of fresh content to remain relevant and engaging.
Our goal for the Day in the Life photo essay was to visually celebrate and showcase the breadth and depth of NYC Health + Hospitals’ workforce; the individuals across multiple job functions that empowers the largest municipal safety net health care system in the United States to deliver on its mission to equally extend the best health care services to its patients with humanity, dignity and respect, without exception.
The individual had to also exemplify our health system’s ICARE values: Integrity, Compassion, Accountability, Respect and Excellence.
Ultimately, the goal was to celebrate, educate, boost morale and illustrate the diversity and richness of our workforce, and to identify and feature diverse individuals who were also representative of a larger workforce that makes our health care system so special.
PLANNING
First, we settled on defining the format of the Day in the Life photo essay: Photo-rich, with captions and moving quotes to support the imagery. The idea was to capture what a day working in a particular job function was like.
We then settled on the production process. One of the biggest logistical challenges for this project is that NYC Health + Hospitals’ workforce provides care and services in more than 70 patient care locations across the five boroughs of New York City. Solution: We decided to focus on featuring staff who work at our 11 hospitals and 5 post-acute care nursing homes.
We then drafted a tentative production calendar, keeping in mind the goals from the Objective section above. This calendar was shared with relevant stakeholders for awareness and input and updated on a rolling basis.
SELECTION AND INTERNAL RELATIONS
A huge part of the process entailed a lot of tapping into existing relationships, and internal liaising with leaders, department heads, facility communications/marketing contacts and potential subjects to confirm they met our established standards.
One of the key components of the execution process was creation of a standard email which outlined the goal of the Day in the Life and details about the production process and timeline. This way, stakeholders received clear and transparent communications so they could make sound decisions to plan properly.
We had to also focus on how to equitably spread opportunity to be featured in Day in the Life across all of our hospitals and nursing homes and employment levels.
THE PHOTO SHOOT
During the Day in the Life photo shoot, the photographer and producer shadows the subject in their natural working environment. During the shoot, the producer conducts a background interview with the subject to get details about their job function to inform photo captions and quotes that are featured in the photo essay.
PUBLICATION SCHEDULE
Because the production process is so detailed and logistically time consuming, we settled on publishing one Day in the Life photo essay on the last Monday of the month. This gives time to schedule a one-day photo shoot that aligned with the subject’s oftentimes busy schedule. We decided to not publish in July and August to give ourselves a summer break.
WHAT MAKES THIS SO UNIQUE
Day in the Life is a documentary-style photography essay series with strong copy, not editorial art-directed photos. These are photo-journalistic features which aligns with the persona of our health care system.
ACCESSIBILITY CHALLENGES
Approximately 40% of our workforce do not require a computer to complete their job tasks. This reduces our audience access and can cause delays and awareness gaps when we post new content. There is also no mobile access to our internal newsletter which is also an IT challenge that we cannot control. Solution: amplify photos on social media channels to raise awareness among staff and promote awareness of published photo essays through direct email communication with featured individuals and key stakeholders.
Great engagement
From Jan 2025 – Jan 2026, our 9 Day in the Life photo internal e-newsletter photo essays have received more than 11,536 and counting, unique internal views and more than 250 likes.
It is also a contributing factor to our now 40,000+ average weekly visits to our Insider intranet e-newsletter.
Increased solicitations
When Day in the Life first launched in 2024, we experienced challenges getting buy-in and raising enthusiasm. We did a lot of leg work identifying staff to feature. By our second year in 2025, Day in the Life had received so much engagement and accolades from our workforce that we now get frequent solicitations on staff to feature.
Extended life and prominence in high visibility spaces
One unexpected byproduct of Day in the Life is that senior leadership have requested that select photos from the series be professionally printed, mounted and displayed in our health system’s executive board room where the board of directors, senior executives, elected officials and prominent visitors can see our work. The photos have become a source of immense pride.
Analytics proves impact
Day in the Life is our only internal editorial feature which receives such diverse engagement—including unique views, likes, thank you emails to the producers and word-of-mouth promotion.
Day in the Life photos are also repurposed and amplified externally on our social media channels, contributing to 1.6 million average monthly impressions and 400K unique monthly views across our social media channels.
