F+A has worked with Kirkland, Washington-based health system EvergreenHealth for more than a decade, supporting the public hospital district on its wide-ranging internal and external marketing and communication initiatives, serving as both a strategic counselor and tactical execution team. We’ve partnered with EvergreenHealth throughout a period of significant growth as the industry has seen a dramatic transformation in health care delivery, and as EvergreenHealth has expanded to offer a breadth of services and programs that are among the most comprehensive in the Pacific Northwest region.

In early 2020 as news of the novel coronavirus began to gain traction in the U.S. and abroad, EvergreenHealth was preparing for the probability of COVID-19’s arrival. But on Friday evening, Feb. 28, 2020, EvergreenHealth got a call they never expected. State health officials confirmed that the suburban health system had just become the first hospital in the country with confirmed cases of community-spread COVID-19. By morning, the health system would have national media at its doorstep, and F+A needed to provide a strategy for managing a tidal wave of news coverage and media opportunities while preserving EvergreenHealth’s narrative and place in history. Beyond the initial breaking news cycle, EvergreenHealth would find itself at the center of national media conversations for months to come. We would need to pivot our largely outbound media outreach strategy to one that systemically managed a steady influx of media interest from outlets around the globe.

Working in tandem with EvergreenHealth’s chief communication officer and in-house marketing team, F+A led media relations strategy that drew on our existing systems, as well as new protocols that would need to evolve as rapidly as the new global pandemic was unfolding. Our approach included the following components:

• Foundational key messaging: Solidifying key messages based on current factual information for our key audiences was a critical first step to ensuring EvergreenHealth was perceived as a credible source in the midst of a storm of speculation, misinformation and rapidly changing guidelines from health authorities. This early work on messaging, which we continually revisited, served as an important foundation for all internal and external communications.
• Escalation and prioritization matrix: We quickly created the blueprint for how EvergreenHealth would prioritize and select which media interviews to pursue, paired with the most appropriate spokesperson to conduct the interview. The matrix inputs included the outlet’s reach, key audiences, timeliness/deadline and potential risks to the organization.
• Media spokesperson training: To help ensure effective delivery of EvergreenHealth’s key messages, we led intensive spokesperson training workshops to refresh key leaders including the CEO and other executives, as well as clinical providers, on best practices for navigating an interview, managing reactive scenarios and delivering sterling sound bites that helped us craft the media narrative.
• Boots on the ground: As soon as the news of EvergreenHealth’s positive cases hit, F+A embedded agency principals and account team members on site at the Kirkland medical center for several weeks, ensuring seamless collaboration and real-time support.
• Coordination, facilitation and real-time tracking: Following our standard approach, once we determined which opportunities to pursue, F+A coordinated dozens of print and broadcast media interviews with national media and facilitated interviews with EvergreenHealth spokespersons. Our airtight project management and tracking systems ensured we catalogued all inbound media requests and flagged and analyzed coverage as it published in real-time.

• Our systematic and detailed media response process resulted in fielding more than 400 unique media inquiries, which earned the health system more than 3,700 favorable earned media placements worldwide through December 2020.
• In 2020, favorable mentions of EvergreenHealth garnered nearly 2 billion impressions worldwide and $34 million in publicity value.
• Notable media coverage included features in The Seattle Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, CNN, NPR and many others.
• Concurrent to executing our strategy for the broader health system, we also worked directly with physicians to advance thought leadership by placing byline articles with national reach. Notably, we successfully placed pieces in NYT’s Modern Love and Well sections.