Objectives

Coordinated Health (CH) is the third largest specialized hospital network serving the greater Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. CH was born out of a sports medicine tradition with many of its founders and clinicians serving as team staff for top high school, college, and professional sports teams. This pedigree allowed CH to offer local patients the same high-level care previously reserved for elite athletes. Combined with service and affordability, this proposition made them the number one sports medicine provider in the area until competition from larger hospital networks diminished this position.

We were challenged with bringing CH's accessible, professional-level sports medicine expertise to the forefront in a highly saturated, competitive market. Our target audience included student athletes and the healthcare decision makers in their families, as well as dedicated weekend warriors.

Digital was a new frontier for CH. This would be the first digitally-led, integrated campaign that used social media as the main broadcast medium, and they were understandably cautious. We would have to validate the effectiveness of the channel using mostly organic reach due to very little digital media budget. Performance would be judged on social engagement, traffic back to the website, new patient testimonials, and lift in appointments.

Strategy and Execution

Two insights laid the foundation for the #GreaterThanOne campaign:

1. Patients are likely to choose physicians based on credible recommendations.
2. Nothing great is achieved alone. Successful athletes have a supporting cast that focus and guide their efforts.

We selected Featured Athletes who were CH patients that overcame serious injuries to return to the sports they love. We celebrated the people that made them "greater than one" by telling the story of their comeback through the eyes of the coaches, families, and CH clinicians that supported them. This approach allowed the patients and the people around them to educate consumers about the process and experience of working with CH's top sports medicine experts. It also allowed us to leverage the social networks of everyone involved to magnify the reach of the content.

To overcome a small social media footprint, our tactics were designed to create exciting content that turned the athletes and their supporters into local heroes that engaged with their communities.

Featured Patient Stories

Using branded video, photography, and captivating copy, we created mini documentaries with each athlete and their supporters narrating their comeback story. Every week started with a new story published on Facebook and Twitter, and continued with a new character's perspective published daily. The athletes and their supporters shared enthusiastically, and each new post sparked a wave of engagement with CH's social properties. Putting CH clinicians on equal footing with the other characters in the story allowed us to showcase the role each one played in the process from surgery, to rehabilitation, to performance training. We found that the clinician's content sparked the most engagement with previous patients responding to posts with accolades and appreciative comments.

Crowdfunding Campaigns

To extend the engagement from our athletes and to mobilize their communities, we created crowdfunding campaigns to turn their moment in the spotlight into an opportunity for social good. Each athlete selected a cause that would be funded on Indiegogo and did their part to drum up excitement and support on Facebook and Twitter. This made a real impact with raised funds going towards causes like a high school wrestling scholarship and uniforms and equipment for a girls traveling baseball team.

Become a Featured Patient Contest

We motivated other patients to tell their stories by creating a contest that left the Featured Athlete spot for the final week of the campaign open to any patient who submitted the best comeback story on CH's existing testimonial platform. Even if they were not selected, each patient received a t-shirt for their testimonial. We promoted the contest with posts on Facebook and Twitter alongside the Featured Patient stories and saw a surge in patient testimonials on the CH website.

Greater Than One Microsite

The central hub of the campaign was a microsite that housed all of the stories, tracked progress for each featured athlete's crowdfunding campaign, and made the patient testimonial platform easily accessible. The microsite linked back to CH's main website with call-to-actions to make appointments.

Results

After the nine weeks of the campaign, we saw stellar results: a 97% increase in traffic to the website, a 55% increase in total patient testimonials, a 54% increase in Facebook page likes, thousands of engagements on Facebook and Twitter, 5 successful crowdfunding campaigns, and a significant increase in appointment requests made through CH's website. We validated digital and social as an effective means to engage the local community and drive quality traffic to the website. We also found that CH staff enjoyed supporting their colleagues on Facebook, creating a new channel for the company to engage internally.

Media