It was great to see the comms team behind the work to tell people about the creation of England’s first purpose-built specialist emergency care hospital get some recognition at the north east CIPR Pride awards last week.
The Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust were well deserved winners of both the Best Healthcare and the Best Use of Digital campaigns for their work.
This isn’t some back door way of plugging our work by the way – we weren’t involved (would love to be next time though guys and girls) but it is good to see an important and successful campaign recognised by the industry.
The team running the microsite at the heart of the campaign – https://www.northumbria.nhs.uk/emergency/ – did a great job in keeping it up to date and relevant to the audience.
This was a classic example of a campaign where someone had clearly sat and thought about the objectives they wanted to achieve and built the campaign around that (I know that sounds like PR lesson 101 but it is amazing how often people ignore this concept).
Directing patient behaviour and building understanding of some fairly major changes was at the heart of the campaign, and by ‘Telling the Northumbria story’ in a creative way they achieved it.
A bit of digital advertising (yes, it’s still PR folks, just not as we know it, but that is a different blog post) some innovative use of social media tricks like Thunderclap to create momentum and some good old-fashioned media relations and planning to deliver a meaningful campaign right across Northumberland really paid dividends.
Well done all, keep up the good work!