This will be the final post in the community benefit series. I’ll be sharing details on how to expand the healthcare omnichannel presence by creating greater awareness. With a best in class digital experience on your flagship site (as discussed in the second post) and how to create stickiness strategies with an omnichannel approach (blog post 1), it is important to continuously expand reach for community benefit programs/activities
Leverage Social Media
Ensure your efforts includes social media as a way to extend reach across the key channels your organization uses such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Set up dedicated social media accounts for community efforts to help create awareness and promote upcoming events without getting messages diluted with other messages via main social media accounts. Offer a particular day and time when you will have a live chat across various social media channels to address questions related to community benefit.
Maximize Community Partnerships
Working with your community partners create flyers that they can use directly out within the community. These may be useable across various formats such as handing out across the community, notice boards, bus stop posters, on their websites, etc. Identify what additional resources your community partners need to raise awareness of the services being offered that could expand reach within the neighborhoods and the local community.
Update Resources
Regularly offer new resources that can be downloaded and used from the flagship website. Set up an editorial content calendar to ensure you have new resources to post each month or quarter. These can then be promoted across social media channels, community partners and the flagship website. This will ensure stickiness and continue to expand reach as the resources are shared.
Expand Awareness With Blog and News
Continue to showcase the impacts you are making the health and wellbeing of the local community by blogging stories and information on the impacts the community health improvement programs/activities are making. This constant source of new content from the blog can then be used to integrate into the Community area of the website. If you have a separate news area on your website and there are community-related stories being created, this is another area to integrate. By offering a small number of blog posts and news stories will highlight the work being done. This can also be done for health professions education.
Offer Multiple Language Support
At times there are communication barriers when helping the underserved community. It is an important step to show your organizations commitment by offering resources in additional languages that are relevant for the local community needs to support those where English is not the first language. Increasing this access greatly helps reduce barriers and challenges.
Dedicated About Us Webpage
Creating a dedicated About Us webpage tied to community benefit can help highlight the mission and values of your organization. Showing to improve the health of individuals, neighborhoods, and communities will ensure all audiences are clear on the commitments.
Collaborate With Internal Teams
There are so many ways in which to ensure you continue to raising awareness to reach as much of those underserved in the community as possible. For example, having the Community Engagement Officer working closely with the Marketing team can ensure dedicated resource(s) are applied to run campaigns to maintain each program’s awareness and reach. This can be across social media, offline and on the flagship website. Again, this can also apply to the health professions education activities to ensure they continue to remain popular.
Community is an important area of your nonprofit hospital or healthcare system website and as a result, it requires dedicated resources and efforts as is done in creating and implementing community benefit programs/activities. As I have outlined a number of strategies to expand awareness and reach to maintain continuous momentum in your organization’s efforts as well as stickiness in a healthcare omnichannel presence (previous post), it’s imperative in telling the complete story about your organization and what’s at the heart of it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this series on community benefit, I look forward to hearing some of the challenges and successes you have experience with this website area and the healthcare omnichannel presence. Please leave your comments below.
