Resources Mentioned in Today's Episode

• Beckers Hospital Review Article: How COVID-19 is changing hospitals' marketing strategies
• Washington Post Article: No Deaths and an Army of Hospital Workers Ready to Fight: A Rural Town’s Prescription For a Nation Weighing What’s Next
• Harvard Business Review Article: How One Health System Is Transforming in Response to COVID-19

Key Takeaways

Geisinger's Marketing Messaging 

• The communications function has pivoted just as the organization has pivoted to reopen.
• Pennsylvania has created a color-coded reopening system.
• One of the hurdles is safety, so we're trying to reinforce that message while supporting operations and clinical teams, and ensuring that we're getting people back appropriately.

Keeping People Informed and Ensuring Operations Continue 

• We pivoted as we shut down non-emergent procedures and closed down many clinics.
  • We provided a prevention message about COVID-19.
  • We were ready as a department to support efforts with marketing materials.

Distributing Internal and External Communications 

• Many of our surrounding households have a Geisinger employee in them, so we have to be very thoughtful about our internal communications from that perspective and think through the community impact of every decision.

Pivoting into a Crisis with New Branding  

• Our new brand message explains why we do what we do, which is what I believe is the essence of a good brand.
  • We did some hard work in 2019 and finished around the holidays.
  • We launched it around our core essence that we're not just about health care; we're about total health.

Brand Evolution in a Post-COVID-19 Environment 

• As a health system in a rural area, we can't postpone needed care — even in a pandemic.
• Some things were postponed that were not life-threatening in March that became life-threatening in May.
• As we move into a potential second surge, we need to be clear about what care our communities still have access to.

Geisinger Moving Forward 

• We saw increased interest in internal communication utilization, so we're going to try to figure out a way to keep that traffic level up through our intranet, push communications, and email.
• We did some experimentation with multicultural marketing because we have pockets of predominately Spanish speaking communities that were not receiving communications.
  • We were seeing them show up in the ED without much information, so we created an infrastructure to support those communities moving forward.
• Utilizing virtual meetings can promote our organizations either from a paid or an earned media perspective.