THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Meet Eva: The Curious Nurse Who Transformed Healthcare Social Media

Entered in Fitness, Health, & Wellness

Objective

In healthcare, social media is too often a crowded, unimaginative space. Hospitals and health systems across the country rely on the same safe formula for content topics: patient testimonials, physician quotes, health tips in templated formats, and staff recognition posts. While important, these posts blur together in a sea of sameness — producing limited engagement, low recall, and almost no meaningful differentiation among competitors.

At Endeavor Health, we needed a new way to bring our expertise to life — one that would stop thumbs, spark curiosity, and make people actually want to connect with us. We knew that if we continued following the industry playbook, we’d continue getting industry-standard results.

So, we asked a bold question: What if a health system could become thumb-stopping? What if we could create content that felt warm, human, expert — and genuinely delightful? Could we actually connect with our audience in meaningful ways?

That’s when Eva, our all-new social influencer nurse was born. She also happens to be designed by us specifically to stand out from the other healthcare brand crowds. Eva represents a new model for healthcare engagement: approachable, smart, friendly, and built specifically for how consumers behave on social platforms. Our goals were to:

Eva launched on April 2, 2025 — and completely changed the trajectory of our social performance.

Strategy

A consumer focus group revealed something we always suspected but had never seen so clearly: people trust healthcare brands more when content feels human, helpful, and rooted in real expertise — but they also scroll past anything that looks like every other hospital.

Patients told us directly: “If it doesn’t look different, I won’t click.” This validation led us to create Eva, an illustrated nurse grounded in warmth, clarity, and expert care. She was intentionally simple and recognizable — stethoscope, glasses, approachable posture — and designed to stand out visually in any feed.

Execution:  Across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Eva delivered monthly sets of five posts across Endeavor’s top service lines. Posts included quizzes, myth-busters, evidence-based tips, short-form videos, and snackable infographics — all branded in Eva’s distinctive palette, branded Endeavor Health name badge, and supported by paid media. Eva’s monthly creative themes were intentionally diverse (e.g., anti-cancer foods, summer skin surprises, brain health, probiotics vs. prebiotics). Her content mixed clinical expertise with relatable scenarios, emotional cues, and bold color blocking — exactly what focus group participants responded to.

Innovation: Eva is the first-ever illustrated healthcare “expert” character in the Chicagoland market — and one of the first nationally to star in a social campaign at health system scale. She functions as both a brand asset and an educational guide, making authoritative topics feel friendly rather than intimidating. Eva continues to evolve. She has been incorporated into video-forward content, blending animation with real Advanced Practice Providers (APPs). This hybrid model further strengthened credibility while expanding creative possibilities.

Challenges & Breakthroughs:

Eva not only solved a tactical problem — she fundamentally changed the way we create and deploy social content as a health system.

Results

Eva didn’t just stand out — she redefined what success looks like for healthcare social media.

  1. Massive Engagement & Efficiency
    1. 27.6 million impressions across 84 posts (April–October).
    2. 366,477 link clicks to EndeavorHealth.org.
    3. $0.45 — outperforming the healthcare industry benchmark ($1.32) by more than 50%.
    4. Top performers saw extraordinary efficiency, with CPCs as low as $0.16 on YouTube. Even Eva’s lowest-performing Instagram posts still met or beat typical healthcare benchmarks.
  2. Audience Growth That Outpaced the Market
    1. +153% net growth on Facebook (vs. –135% pre-Eva).
    2. +97% net growth on Instagram.
    3. +482% net growth on TikTok.
    4. Eva reversed declining engagement trends and repositioned Endeavor Health as a rising social brand.
  3. Website Traffic Skyrocketed (Comparing post-Eva to pre-Eva performance)
    1. 1,420% increase in social-driven traffic from Facebook
    2. 193,848% increase from Instagram
    3. Eva became one of the strongest digital referral engines across the entire organization.
  4. Brand Impact
    1. Eva created a memorable, differentiated social identity that patients noticed — and remembered. Focus group participants consistently described her as: “Inviting.” “Friendly.” “Knowledgeable.” “Someone I’d click on.”
  5. A Scalable, Growing Platform
    1. Eva’s success has now expanded into video, TikTok, and YouTube, already delivering 53,094 additional clicks at an efficient $0.33 CPC

Eva is now a core part of Endeavor Health’s digital brand — a true thumb-stopping solution to a long-standing industry problem.

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Entrant Company / Organization Name

Endeavor Health

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