Hospital system uses event sponsorship for content marketing success

A kindness-focused event isn’t a bad one for any organization to align itself with. Dignity Health has gotten such value out of its title sponsorship of the Great Kindness Challenge that it undertook the role for a fifth year. Its success has earned it first place in the “Content Marketing and Brand Journalism” category of Ragan’s 2018 Health Care PR and Marketing awards. 

The event challenges elementary, middle and high school students to make lifelong commitments to kindness; more than 20 million students from around the world participate, each completing a checklist of 50 acts of kindness in a single week. 

Dignity’s content marketing goals were fairly routine: Build greater awareness of the organization’s support of the Challenge and offer opportunities for consumer engagement with event content. The team undertook a process to identify four children whose lives would improve through acts of kindness and then brought their dreams to life, all chronicled in a video series. 

A microsite housed multiple content types related to the event. To extend the reach of the content, the team created toolkits that included media pitches, press release templates, talking points, social posts, creative activation ideas and more that the communicators working in Dignity’s various service areas could use. 

It took six months to develop and execute the three phases of the project: a research phase to guide the campaign, a video shoot coordinated with a local elementary school and internal communications across 39 hospitals to extend the reach of the content. 

The creative assets and videos drew 1.9 million social engagements, a 170 percent increase from the previous year, and 1.8 million video views, up 125 percent from the previous year. The team also secured 50 earned media placements, up nearly 50 percent from the year before. 

Congratulations to Dignity Health for a well-researched and coordinated effort.