MMHA 6800 Week 4 Campaign Brief Example

One Number, One Date: A Campaign Brief for the First Months of a Pediatric Urgent Care Site

Student Name

Walden University

MMHA 6800: Marketing Management and Business Communication for Healthcare Administrators

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Number, One Date: A Campaign Brief for the First Months of a Pediatric Urgent Care Site

Background

Brightwater Kids Urgent Care opens at Maple Crossing on a set date in the spring, run by Brightwater Health, the invented regional system whose launch this term follows. Earlier work settled three inputs: the audience (families facing an after-hours choice for a sick child), the position (a close-by, children-only option for problems short of an emergency) and a cleared list of supportable claims. This brief turns that work into instructions for the agency and the internal team for the first five months after opening.

Objective

By the last day of the fifth full month after opening, Brightwater Kids Urgent Care will have seen at least 1,500 unique children from households within a fifteen-minute drive of Maple Crossing who had no prior visit to any Brightwater site, measured from registration data by home ZIP code and visit history.

Several choices sit inside that sentence. The objective counts new families, not all visits, because the launch's purpose is to reach families who do not yet use Brightwater; existing patients will find the site through their own pediatricians. It counts unique children rather than visits so that one family's repeat visits do not inflate the result. It limits geography to the area the site is meant to serve. And it names a date and a data source, so that the result cannot be argued after the fact. The figure of 1,500 is an illustrative target derived from the planning estimate of about 9,800 households in the area, an expected share with young children and a first-season uptake assumption that the finance team accepted.

Reviews of mass media health campaigns find that campaigns work best when they have clear, measurable objectives and target a specific behavior in a defined audience (Wakefield et al., 2010). This campaign's behavior is concrete: choosing the new site for a child's first visit.

Audience and Insight

The campaign speaks to mothers, fathers and other caregivers of children younger than twelve living a short drive from the site. The insight from parent interviews is that families want children's expertise and convenience at the same time and currently must choose one. The campaign's job is to make the new site the default answer to the question parents ask on a weeknight: where do we take her now?

Message

The single-minded message is: when your child gets sick after hours and it is not an emergency, a place made just for kids is now down the road. Supporting points, all cleared in the Week 3 claims review, are pediatric-trained physicians and nurse practitioners, on-site X-ray, a visit summary sent to the child's doctor and exact hours. Each piece also lists, in a few words, the symptoms that call for 911 or the emergency department instead.

Channels and Timing

Research on health communication campaigns has found that exposure must be sustained and reach the audience through channels it already uses for the behavior to change (Noar, 2006). The two direct mail waves and continuous search advertising follow that logic: awareness first, then presence at the moment of need.

Table 1

Channels, Rationale and Timing

Channels are chosen for where parents are when the decision arises, not for reach alone.

Budget

The illustrative five-month budget is $140,000: about 40 percent for search advertising, 30 percent for two direct mail waves, 15 percent for creative production, 10 percent for the open house and community events and 5 percent for measurement. The largest share goes to search because it reaches parents at the decision.

Measurement

The primary measure is the objective itself, reported monthly from registration data. Supporting measures include new-family visits by referring source, asked at registration with a short question; search advertising clicks and calls; the share of visits that are transferred to the emergency department, which should stay low if the campaign is drawing the right patients; and a brief satisfaction text sent to parents the morning after each visit.

Risks

The main risk is drawing the wrong patients. If parents bring children with serious illness because the campaign made the site sound like an emergency department, children will be transferred, families will be frustrated and the site's reputation will suffer. The emergency warning list on every piece, and the transfer-rate measure, guard against that. Pediatric guidance on nonemergency acute care stresses that such sites should be clear about what they can and cannot manage (Conners et al., 2017). A second risk is pulling patients away from pediatric practices during their open hours. The campaign avoids daytime messages and promotes the site only for evenings and weekends, which protects the relationship with referring pediatricians that the Week 7 pitch will build. A third risk is a slow start that tempts the team to widen the audience or soften the objective midstream; the brief asks that any change to the objective go back to the marketing director in writing.

Mandatories

Every piece must carry the site's exact hours, the emergency warning signs, the Brightwater name and logo and any disclosures required by the compliance review. No piece may make a claim not on the cleared list. Photographs must show the real site and real staff who have consented.

Approvals

The marketing director approves creative; the site's medical director approves clinical wording, including the emergency warning list; the compliance officer approves claims and disclosures.

Conclusion

The brief gives the agency one audience, one message, one number and one date. Everything else, channels, budget, timing and measures, is chosen to reach that number by that date. If the site sees 1,500 new local children in five months, the launch will have done what it was for.

References

Conners, G. P., Kressly, S. J., Perrin, J. M., Richerson, J. E., & Sankrithi, U. M. (2017). Nonemergency acute care: When it's not the medical home. Pediatrics, 139(5), e20170629. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2017-0629

Noar, S. M. (2006). A 10-year retrospective of research in health mass media campaigns: Where do we go from here? Journal of Health Communication, 11(1), 21-42. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730500461059

Wakefield, M. A., Loken, B., & Hornik, R. C. (2010). Use of mass media campaigns to change health behaviour. The Lancet, 376(9748), 1261-1271. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60809-4