Community Health Centers are at an historic crossroads, where few federal programs find themselves. In the last 8 years they have seen tremendous growth, enjoyed the support of bipartisan Congress, and two sitting presidents on opposite sides of the political aisle.
Community Health Centers have been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and profiled on PBS NewsHour.
One. The health center mission sells itself. The notion of providing access to affordable health care to everyone is democracy at its best. Also, you are community run and ultimately people are willing to invest in their communities. Two, Community Health Centers have compiled a record of success in terms of cost-savings and delivering results – more on message later. Messengers are our grassroots advocates, but also our champions on both sides of the aisle who going to the mat to promote the value of access.
Here is where we are after that a one-time historic 2.5 billion invested in Community Health Centers, and over 2 million invested in Wyoming health centers alone.
NACHC now receives on average 2-5 press queries a week on economic stimulus/economic downturn stories from the media. This is a great opportunity to communicate the value of health centers as a solution by providing access to care, particularly in times of crisis.
We also have the added benefit now of the Obama Administration actively promoting the critical role health centers and the value of the stimulus investment. To ensure accountability and transparency, health centers must do their part to ensure their communities/states that the stimulus funds are delivering on the promise of expanded care and job creation.
The news media is reporting stimulus stories in the larger context of meeting the needs of people impacted by the economy. 892 news hits on Google. Members of Congress are also sending out hundreds of press releases, blogs during stimulus grant announcements. There’s also the new media – social media – Facebook and Twitter. Health centers do have 549 fans on Facebook
The advantage is there are multiple platforms for sharing information among consumers. Also, NACHC uses social media to build traffic to our web site. From June 2008-2009, we’ve seen an increase of 11,000 visits to our web site, from 20,961 to 31,115.
Communicating value through your champions. NACHC uses communications to reward our champions and providing them with the tools to promote their support of health centers. In this case, Rep. Bilirakis used a NACHC written press release to promote his support of health center initiatives on Capitol Hill. We also align our communications to foster positive stories about our health center champions.
People not only go online to find you, but to find out more about you, whether it’s journalists, patients, or funders. Most chc web sites I see gear their web sites to the community/patients.
The top four news sites Yahoo, MSNBC.com, CNN.com and AOL saw their visitors growing 22 percent to 23.6 million a month. -- Project for excellence in journalism. If you have a communications plan it should include an online presence.
We also recommend a social media presence which allows a health center to engage multiple audiences at a single time – it has the potential to reach billions of people, and it’s also free.
Whether your efforts to communicate value to recruit, market or engage the media, social media allows an information source to pushing content out through multiple forms of distribution– with the potential to go viral.
Instead of pitching media be the media.
Photo: United Health Services, Nashville, TN
Communicating without a plan is like running through the forest without a compass. The process to start with is to ask what your organizational goals are – workforce recruitment? Fundraising? Building public support? Outline your organizational goals and develop a communications plan that will help your organization achieve those goals.
To assist you, NACHC also has a media toolkit with talking points, templates on the web site.
There is also a print out version of the media toolkit.