Webinar: Inside AMC Marketing: Leaders Share Strategies for Success

0:00:00.3 Kirsten Lecky: Hello everybody. Welcome to our webinar on Inside AMC Marketing Leaders Sharing Strategies for Success. We have a great session today. We’re going to go really a little bit more different today where it’s more of a conversation, lots of Q&A. We will not be sharing any sort of formal slides or anything like that or any visuals. We’ll be able to have time for questions at the end. I am Kirsten Lecky from WG Content, formerly Writer Girl and Associates. We are excited to have three guests with us today from academic medical centers. We do want to be respectful of your time, we’re going to move through these questions and this conversation and try to wrap up within 45 minutes. If you would like to submit a question you will see at the bottom of your screen there is an opportunity to submit those questions there and I will be looking for those, triaging those and sharing those towards the end of the webinar. And also this will be recorded we’ll be sure to send everyone the recording following our conversation A little bit about WG Content if you’re not familiar with who we are, we are a content agency.

0:01:15.5 Kirsten Lecky: We specialize in helping healthcare organizations achieve their marketing and communication goals one word at a time. And we like to say we build relationships one word at a time. All right so let’s get us kicked off with our guests. I’m going to start by introducing each of them. Let’s start with Jen Brass Jenkins. She is the Associate Director of Web and Digital for University of Utah Health and has been a long friend of ours over here at WG Content. She oversees targeted strategies to put the audience front and center while navigating stakeholder needs. She does a lot of content strategy, considering information architecture and how they can scale content to meet future needs. And her team also works with a pool of agencies and freelancers to meet website and content creation needs. And a fun fact about Jen is that if she wasn’t doing this job today, she would be a fine arts painter. Something very cool about Jen. We had a fun conversation about that. All right, then we have Julie Levin. She is the Senior Director of Development, Communications, Wave Julie from University of Miami Health System. Also a long friend of ours, Julie develops and implements philanthropic and alumni campaigns for UM’s Miller School of Medicine, U Health, the University of Miami Health System and Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

0:02:28.4 Kirsten Lecky: She leads a communication team that produces award winning magazine award winning digital e-newsletters, virtual town halls, event coverage, leadership talking points, content creation, digital campaigns, donor and alumni profiles, Brochures and videos. Which is just a little bit of a job. And a fun fact about Julie and what she would want to do if she wasn’t doing this job is that she would be a landscape architect. I told Julie I would rather clean toilets than pull weeds. I love that you love to do that. I think that’s great. All right, and then we have Dawn, also a friend of ours. She’s the senior Director of Marketing at UW Medicine. Dawn plays an integral role in shaping the institution’s marketing strategies and communication initiatives. Her leadership and expertise allow her to effectively promote healthcare innovations, engage with diverse audiences, and enhance the overall patient experience through comprehensive marketing campaigns. And Dawn, welcome to the webinar. If she was not doing her job today, she was torn between two things. One, she’d love to be a UPS driver, which I totally get that because she said delivering gifts and satisfying dropping off packages, people are always happy with those packages.

0:03:38.5 Kirsten Lecky: But she’d also run a Basset Hound Sanctuary, which is just another Basset Hound connection. I guess the more we talk about things like this, the more connections we make. I love that. And we both love Basset Hounds, that’s great. Welcome, all three of you. I really appreciate you guys taking some time to chat with us this afternoon. I think it’s time for us to just get right into the questions. You guys ready? All right, here we go. I have all of my notes here in front of me, I want to make sure I’m following the right ones. Okay. To get us started, I think you guys would all agree that we’ve seen marketing teams have really been moving from more of a support function to really a strategic partner and really playing across all parts of the institution within not just academic medicine, but all healthcare organizations. Dawn and Jen both, I’d like to hear from both of you and certainly Julie as well. How have you both experienced this? What steps have you taken to change that perception and demonstrate your value within your institution? Dawn, do you want to maybe give us kick us off and share how you’ve seen that playing out at UW Medicine?

0:04:46.9 Dawn Weyant: Sure, yeah. At our organization, what’s been really great and transformative as marketing team is our ability to create and have partnerships across the organization. I think when I started, we really had strong relationships with our clinical teams and maybe in our service line teams. But as we’ve evolved as marketing team, a marketing and communications team is leaning into our partnerships within the organization and across the organization so that we are viewed as a strategic partner on the business side of the house. Because that’s really what we as a marketing team are trying to do, is to help manage and invest growth and supporting the growth strategies for the organization. Truly building and being seen as a partner and it’s an evolving partnership and growth that we continue to lean into with leaders in strategy, with leaders in access, with leaders of course on the clinical operational side of the house. But expanding those relationships with our partnerships with patient experience, our partnerships with HR. Truly expanding our relationships across the organization and building out campaigns that are meeting the goals and the missions of our organization.

0:06:11.4 Dawn Weyant: We’ve done a lot of work within our organization to prove that and we brought on a lot of tools as well that are helping us demonstrate that marketing isn’t just an advertising or a billboard. We are driving patients into our system, acquiring patients net new and supporting the growth strategies for our organization.

0:06:35.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, we’ve talked to over the years, feedback that we’ve received too is even just this sort of shift in the language that we use in marketing and shifting from marketing to communications and patient education. And really it’s not because there’s a perception of marketing. It’s people place product price and you’re selling things and all those things. But it really is this critical function of the institution around education and communication and population health and certainly an outcome of that. It is a business as well. It’s acquiring patience. Jen, what would you add to that? What are some of the things that you’ve seen? You’ve been in your organization for a long time, efforts that you’ve taken or changes that you’ve seen. Where this shift is happening.

0:07:19.6 Jen Brass Jenkins: Can I just say finally, of course we should have always been a strategic partner. Right?

0:07:24.5 Dawn Weyant: So true.

0:07:25.4 Jen Brass Jenkins: Because marketing is a new function of in healthcare. Communications has been here for a long, long time before marketing ever existed. And trying to help our stakeholders understand that marketing is. We’re not just flash in the pan, fancy, oh, let’s make somebody look good. Ego. We are here to promote and empower our patients, really. To make it easier for them to connect with us. A big part of building that strategic partnership has been literally demonstrating how we align with business strategy and priorities. And I, that’s communications. I tend to over communicate. Sometimes people are like, thank you, Jen. We don’t need to know that. But often I’ll bring up things and people will be like, we don’t need that. And then a few weeks later they have to plan a communication because somebody came and was like, what are you doing? What’s going on here? I’d much rather be proactive and be like, here’s what we’re doing. We’re experts in this area. You have to call yourself an expert. Don’t wait for somebody to do it. Just say, I’m an expert and here’s my data. Because we’re those are the people that we’re sitting with. They’re like, well, we’re experts. Guess what, we are too. Here’s our data to show you what we’ve done. That’s a big thing we’ve done.

0:08:42.5 Kirsten Lecky: And have you found that that’s taken time?

0:08:46.3 Jen Brass Jenkins: Oh, yes.

0:08:46.8 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. It’s not something that. I was speaking with a few other healthcare marketing leaders from another academic medical center a few weeks ago and they were talking about their discipline around internal audiences, like remembering that internal audience. And like you were just talking about it’s, you’re an over communicator. Your stakeholders might not know what they don’t know or they’re not asking those questions. And remembering that we have all these audiences, but one of those really is our stakeholders, like they are an audience as well. Julie, anything else that you would add to that in terms of seeing that shift and really being purposeful about building that?

0:09:24.3 Julie Levin: I would agree with both of my colleagues. When I started in my position, I think it was coming on 12 years ago on our medical campus, I was the only person charged with communications. On the philanthropic side, we had a medical communications team, but in terms of what we call now called devcom, I was the only one. And it didn’t exist really on our broader campus down in Coral Gables. Now it’s a full fledged team of about 20, 30 people. I have four people on my team. And our bigger team that we report to on our bigger campus has about 16 people. I think just by virtue of that growth alone, it’s been understood that what we’re doing is valid and important. Of course, we always knew that, but now others are using that as an example as well and we have plenty to back it up with.

0:10:18.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, Jen, I want to just ask a follow up question around that over communicating and maybe any of you can answer this too because like, what is the best. This is a very tactical Practical question, like how do you do that? Are there platforms? Are there tools, are there meetings, are there dashboards, are there? Like how do you guys communicate? If you think about your stakeholders as your internal audience, like what? How are you getting in front of them?

0:10:44.0 Jen Brass Jenkins: That is the pipe dream that we all hope to achieve because I swear to you, there are, as everybody knows, there are at least five audiences or multiple people who think they should know about something before it happens, which isn’t always true. At the same time that I’m a big fan of making sure the people who want to know are included. Who feel their work is affected. To me that’s really important and that’s important part of being feel included in your organization or at the table. But I find we have the executive leadership, then we have like the department level leadership. Gotta love this thumbs up.

0:11:18.5 Kirsten Lecky: I don’t know if mine ever work.

0:11:19.8 Jen Brass Jenkins: I know. Well, don’t you worry because mine works. I know, right. Then we have like physician leadership. Administrative leadership. Then we have providers just on other levels who don’t necessarily have marketing support. We partner. I work a lot with digital and web, we work with communications. We support scheduling. Operations. We support. Then clinical marketing, we support academic marketing. And it’s really about like you said, processes and people. Like which people do you know? What are your priorities, who you need to communicate with. The more people you know, the better. People are always like, I don’t want to talk to other people. Guess what? If you’re in a leadership position, an academic, medical center, start getting to be best friends with everybody. That’s how it works, right?

0:12:17.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And you guys have I think that’s just so compounded in your environment where you’ve got research and science and the medical college and just so many different audience alumni and donors and everything. I can appreciate that challenge.

0:12:32.4 Dawn Weyant: Yeah. And I would add to that, Jen. Socialization is so critical, especially in academic organizations, and 100% agree with that. Like getting in front of as many people or sharing your information programs, things that you are working on across the organization with as many people as you can is key to having success and being viewed as that expert. So that people continue to know that they need to come back to your designated marketing and communications team.

0:13:07.1 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, yeah, no, those are great. And maybe this is something that, and we’ll talk about this in a little bit is that maybe AI can solve for some of this, too. Let’s just put everything we’re doing into some kind of chatGPT and like, anybody can search what we’re doing, when we’re doing it right. Okay. All right, next question. All right, Julie, you come from the advancement side, how have you built. And I know we’ve talked a lot about your passion. You are a former journalism reporter, you’ve always been in this space as a storyteller. How have you built a more strategic relationship with both development officers and marketing teams? Maybe just a little bit more of what we were just talking about.

0:13:44.5 Julie Levin: Yeah, it goes along with what my colleagues were saying just a moment ago. You can’t know too many people in this business for a lot of reasons. An academic medical officer is a center is a huge enterprise with its web, and everything’s going in a million different directions. And if you keep you and your team in this silo, you’ll do okay. You’ll be fine. But when you expand and you connect with those that are working towards the same goals as yours, you could do so much better. When you see you’re running parallel with something or another office, that’s a great time to reach out to them and say, hey, we’re doing a lot of the same things. Why don’t we collaborate? And we could combine our forces and really conquer this over here, and we could do this over here. A lot of my day, and as I’m sure a lot of your days, is spent talking to people and formulating relationships and having them understand what it is that you do and what you could do for them and how you can take what they’re doing and shine it in the light and work together with all these different teams to accomplish the same goal.

0:14:49.1 Julie Levin: Our big push for us in this past year has just really been setting up touchpoints with a lot of these offices that are in the same place with us. We have a planned giving team. We have a digital engagement team. And we were all chasing the same stories and like banging to each other, and that really wasn’t very effective. We got together one day, and we brought in our communications people from our cancer center and like, let’s all put our cards on the table. Let’s see what we’re working on this month. And you could take from me and I could take from you, and I’ll use that, and we’ll do this, and it’s been working really nicely and it’s making things a lot more organized and just providing for better content because we’re leaning on each other and things that my team might not know to secure and might not be able to secure a certain picture or a certain SME, this team can do. And it’s proving to be very effective and really boosting our output. And early response from our leadership has been very positive.

0:15:55.8 Kirsten Lecky: So you call those touch points? Are those scheduled? Talk a little bit more about the organization around that.

0:16:02.4 Julie Levin: Touch points are we meet once a month and at first we didn’t know what to talk about because this was my stuff and this was your stuff. But then the wall down and we saw that we had a common purpose. And in advancement, we now call development. It used to be advancement, it’s called development, now. Within development, we’re trying to do the same thing. We’re trying to highlight the philanthropy of our donors while also enhancing the reputation of our experts in our school. We had a common goal. We started sitting down with each other and saying, let’s do this together. We have if you’re running a digital campaign, we’ll support you with a video and perhaps a written piece. If we’re doing a piece on a donor you don’t know about, perhaps you want to think about a small campaign. They’ve also provided us with access to the crowd funding pages. We have something called Give Campus, where we have a lot of smaller crowdfunding things going on.

0:17:04.5 Julie Levin: And we borrow from that a lot. We find a story, we get them to set up a giving page. At the end of every story, we can say for more information on this, click here. Because at the end, every piece, we want there to be a call to action, a CTA where people who have read all the way to the end, there’s a nice payoff. If we’ve inspired them so much, they can go here and they can make a gift. And that just really is truly our goal is to get people involved. Now, as the other part of your question, yes, it’s all about storytelling for me. I’m a former reporter and a former news producer. This is pretty much formed me over the first 15 minutes of my career, but I find it very relevant in my role as a senior director here as development. Because I think it all comes back to good storytelling.

0:17:55.1 Kirsten Lecky: Absolutely. And we’ll talk. Yeah, I want to make sure we go back to that because I think that really is at the heart of everything we do. Whether we’re in academic medicine or not. But I want to go back to this idea of like touch points and cross functional and getting everyone a shared line of sight. And we hear that a lot. Like there’s a lot of intent around that because it’s so hard to synthesize everything that we’re all doing every day and what are the headlines and what do we share and how do we organize and summarize some of these things? So at its very practical level, I think does somebody own that? Like does do you have somebody? And I would ask Dawn and Jen the same question, as you’re trying to bring teams together, like who owns that… Does somebody. Everybody has ownership in that, but does somebody like own that meeting? Own the action items, own the follow up, own that sort of cross functional, shared line of sight? Dawn, Jen, do you guys have anything to add to that?

0:18:51.0 Dawn Weyant: Well, from my perspective and experience at UW Medicine, there aren’t designated owners. I think that’s part of the challenge. There’s designated teams. It goes back to that partnership of trying to break down those silos. And our organization moves things forward. I’m gonna say the word, which I hate. Committees, right. We do stand up committees and it’s shared ownership, unfortunately, because there aren’t designated owners for specific projects. And it’s in addition to your day job. It’s standing up these committees and who is going to bring people together and have the. What are those touch points? What do they look like? Are they video meetings in person meetings? Or even an email correspondence? Yeah, in our organization there aren’t designated owners. That’s part of the challenge.

0:19:56.8 Kirsten Lecky: I think. Yeah.

0:19:58.6 Dawn Weyant: Get things moving forward.

0:20:00.6 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. I think communications, content, marketing, that’s so hard to get your arms around. Like, who owns content? Well, everybody does, so having that. Jen, anything to add to that too? Just from a systematic process perspective, like, how do you organize?

0:20:17.8 Jen Brass Jenkins: You need to choose what’s important to your area and become the owner of that. There are owners over multiple. Like we have multiple content channels, challenges too, but channels. And one thing I’ve started doing is compiling a report. Yes. With the help of our project management system. To see everything that gets published. And then I’ll look at performance numbers for that. But I’ll also look at how many things were repurposed. You know what I mean? Are we keeping pace with what we’ve done in past years? This has long been a passion project, I spent a lot of time doing this. But the value out of that is being able to communicate with our stakeholders. Look at how many partners we’re working with, look at how much we’ve published, look at the value add to the total organization, look at what you can repurpose. You know what I mean? You have to decide what’s important and where you’re going to put your time, I think. Because you can own what you care about.

0:21:18.4 Dawn Weyant: I love that.

0:21:19.1 Julie Levin: In these groups that we talk about, it’s just automatically assumed. Like when someone mentions the word donor, everyone looks at my team. We know we own that. If it’s more news based and not necessarily there’s a small philanthropic angle, someone else might take the lead. But to make it happen, we do use a lot of different platforms. We’re connected on a lot of different platforms. We’re able to go into each other’s spreadsheets and look at what they’re planning for the month. And then you might, you see something that might pique your interest when it’s not the week that you’re meeting and say, hey, what are you doing with this? I heard this donor there, you’re going to have a camera that. We do a lot of that stuff. But I think the ownership comes from what Jen was saying. If you see that, it’s in your alley, it’s in your lane. If it’s philanthropic belongs to alumni, that’s your story. And everybody knows that.

0:22:14.7 Kirsten Lecky: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it was…

0:22:15.5 Julie Levin: Saying I’ll take the lead on this and everybody’s like…

0:22:20.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, I think and it’s like sort of the ownership of the bringing of the teams together. It was the more like everyone owns their function and their passion and like what it is, how they’re contributing. But like who owns that. But I think how you all each answer that question gives some idea around how to do that. I appreciate that and I think the idea around you own what you’re passionate about. Jen, you were just saying that. And I think you’re so good at those headlines, because I remember years ago, I think you might have been one of our first guests on our tips in 10, when we bring in people and just ask 10 minutes, let’s have a conversation, share some of your tips around how to make our work more effective or efficient. Anyway, you and I were talking about content strategy, I think it was a few years ago, and you shared some great advice while we were prepping for that. And you said, the power of yes. You’re like, there’s a role magic into this idea of the power of yes and yes and. So talk to us a little bit about that and how you can, like with our audience that’s attending today, how they can adopt that. Ways to embrace and adopt that philosophy.

0:23:27.9 Jen Brass Jenkins: In the first year and a half of my career, in a meeting with a doctor who is a specialist and a specialist who is very important, I uttered the word no to a request and that did not go down well. That never goes down well.

0:23:43.7 Kirsten Lecky: You’re seeing a lot of naughty.

0:23:45.4 Jen Brass Jenkins: Yes. I learned very early on that that is not an appropriate answer in the academic medical center setting. I don’t think it’s an answer that anyone wants to hear. I’ve discovered that you say yes, and. And you say yes, here is what will happen because of that, right? So all they hear is the yes. They just want to hear the yes. I hear your idea. I feel validated. But you can also say, and we’d like to try this other aspect. Or. And we’d also like to do this because I found then you take the data from what you’re doing as an expert, You add it to what they wanted and then they’re like, they won’t say, oh, that thing you did works better. They’ll just say, oh, look at the success of this. So yes. And is, I’ve come to realize, just a way of validating. I’ve heard your request. It’s not the way we would communicate it. We would say, that’s not strategic. Let’s move to this. But nobody wants to be repudiated. That’s a terribly large word for just saying we want somebody to be like, that’s a good idea. You know what I mean?

0:24:49.5 Kirsten Lecky: Do you have a good example that you can share where you’ve used the yes and where maybe a clinical leader or Someone had something.

0:24:55.5 Jen Brass Jenkins: Oh, yes. And I do. I was working with the skull based surgeons. They were very insistent. We’re so specialty focused. At academic medical centers. And I went in and they were like, we need a page that is anterior skull based surgery and lateral scarlet based surgery. And instead of being like, nobody cares about that. Nobody wants to hear about it, I was like, yes, and let’s do one about what are skull based tumors. And then you come back a few months later and your skull based Tumor page gets 60,000 page views. And the anterior page and lateral pages get maybe 800 page views. And they’re like, our site is so successful. This is amazing. What would you suggest next? And I was like thank you guys they succeeded.

0:25:38.8 Kirsten Lecky: What’s your idea?

0:25:41.0 Jen Brass Jenkins: Yeah. Yes. And work.

0:25:43.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, no, that’s a great example. Julie and Dawn, have you guys embraced the. Yes, and maybe without knowing Jen’s philosophy on that, but…

0:25:53.9 Julie Levin: It’s a delicate balance, were we talk with researchers. Sometimes you write something, you send it to them and they write something back that’s so convoluted that nobody’s going to understand it because you don’t understand it. You tweak it a little bit and then you send it back and maybe put the pictures around it and tell them where it’s going to lay out. And they see that you’re this is not fly by operation. Fly by night. This is like a real operation that’s going to look really good. This is what it’s going to look like. And they learn to trust you a little bit more. And they’re like, what? That’s so much better. Go with that. A lot of yes. And look at this picture we’re going to put in there, and that’s what I find works very well.

0:26:38.3 Kirsten Lecky: How about you, Dawn? Any examples of that in your role?

0:26:41.5 Dawn Weyant: 100%, yes. And I love how succinctly you said that, Jen, which is great. Yeah, we have tons of examples of this really turning around. We as well have an example from our neuroscience team where they wanted to reach diagnosed brain aneurysm patients, which is very specialized, very unique, very small audience. And we did, we worked together with that team to stand up we stood up a webpage, we stood up a form for them so that people could identify themselves and get into our system. And guess what? It worked. People were submitting a form, and we were able through video stories, telling what it means, simplifying what brain aneurysms are, the diagnosis, the treatments, etcetera, and pushing that out to consumers and doing some pretty nice sophisticated targeting and driving people into the system. And it was a huge success. It had these downstream impacts of not only bringing in patients, but bringing in additional services and wraparound services that these patients would need. And that was really when I think people started saying, okay, this is like, wow, you guys know what you’re doing? We can do this leveraging the tricks and tools that are out there available to us to get people into the system.

0:28:13.7 Kirsten Lecky: I think one of the things that we hear so often is like, the challenge around working with clinicians, not just because of their availability on the back end for review, or the availability and pulling them in, or their requests and needs, not reconciling with really what truly like plain language communication is, all of the things. I love this idea. I think for anyone listening that’s attending today is like, if you’re wrestling with governance and saying no and trying to have that manage those expectations, just take that as a takeaway. Yes, and it doesn’t feel like you have to say no, just say like, yes, and we’re going to do this. I think that’s great. Thank you for that, Jen, and for the examples, Julie and Dawn. You guys clearly wear a lot of hats. And one of the things I know we’re hearing more and more about too, is we’re the marketing is absorbing and certainly has for a long time. This isn’t new, but it’s maybe showing up a little bit differently in recent years, and that is with recruitment and retention.

0:29:09.5 Kirsten Lecky: The real partnership that we’re seeing with human resources and recruitment and retention efforts. Dawn, talk a little bit about, because I know you’ve played a very integral part in working with your HR department, in helping with recruitment and retention. What does that look like and how have you built that partnership and maybe some success stories that you’ve seen play out.

0:29:31.3 Dawn Weyant: Yeah, this has been one of my favorite partnerships and expansion and the role of marketing that I’ve gotten to lean into. And certainly this is one of those it came out of COVID, which I know we don’t like to talk about, but there was really the need coming in the throes of COVID We were seeing massive resignations, right? Traveling nurses, not being able to get people into applying for jobs and staying in their jobs. And we partnered and leaned in with leadership and with our HR teams to figure out a way that we, as a marketing agent could help them in their recruiting initiatives. They had never had any marketing done for them. This was truly. It’s one of those areas I’ve never done recruiting. I’m not HR. It was a wonderful experience because we got to work together and really create and lean into like, what are we as an employer brand, right? This is that branding marketing conversation of really working collectively with our system to figure out, build out, work on what are we as an employer, what’s our brand, and how do we want to talk about ourselves and get ourselves out into the communities to reach people who might want to work for us.

0:30:55.3 Dawn Weyant: It was a great and continues to be a great experience, really standing up and working with that team to identify what are those positions that we’re in desperate need for. I always like to use the example with nursing. Over the course of the past three years, in working with those, we’ve been able to help our recruiting team and those efforts really reduce vacancy rates for the system. And we’ve seen vacancy rates in the past three, four years go anywhere from 20% down to 3% in some areas. And again, just bringing that lens of marketing, branding, working together to establish who we are as an organization, as an employer, and getting that out there and just collectively working as experts, it’s going back to let’s bring together all the experts to figure out how we’re pushing people into our system.

0:32:01.5 Kirsten Lecky: What I find so interesting too is like, there’s this perception in academic medicine, and I don’t mean that it’s a false perception, but like, academic medicine is very serious, right? It’s a lot of research and science and that comes from an academic. How do you along translate the communication and marketing for an employer or an employee experience and recruitment and retention? There is the seriousness around that messaging that you get into this practice to advance medicine and the health of our communities. But it’s a great place to work and all things. And I would love to hear too, from Dawn, you share, but Jen and Julie, you guys, like, how are you partnering with HR and telling those stories? Dawn, do you want to maybe. I know you had a thought. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

0:32:45.8 Dawn Weyant: No, you didn’t interrupt me at all. Yeah, it goes back to sharing those stories. And having an authentic voice. It always goes back to content and storytelling. We really leaned into working directly with the people with our employees who are passionate about the work they do, they’re passionate about being part of. We’re a mission based organization. It’s being within a system that has different drivers and what that truly means to people and that’s been a huge piece of this success, is being very authentic from the people who are doing the work.

0:33:27.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Jen, do you have anything to add to that?

0:33:30.5 Jen Brass Jenkins: Yeah, it’s really about the employee experience. We’re doing a campaign called Made Better by you right now with internal communications just to emphasize the stories of employees. We have a really strong external brand for a region University of Utah Health has. But when it comes to internally, you need to have a brand that your employees are proud of too. And I think our department is doing a nice job of finding ways to recognize our employees. I’m also like, I don’t need swag. Find the employees who want the swag and the tickets. Because the little things like that is something that we can do.

0:34:11.0 Kirsten Lecky: So, Julie, how about you? I know you’re very passionate about.

0:34:16.2 Julie Levin: This is not an area where in development, we work very strongly. But a couple of years ago, we assisted. And it’s all about the employee stories, as Jen was saying. We stood up a homepage and we created a video for them encouraging people to come because it’s in South Florida, it’s the U. Everyone knows the U. And it’s a great place to work. Been here 12 years. Many people have been here like 28, 30 years. And that’s not uncommon.

0:34:47.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, that’s great. Okay, before we run out of time, I’m watching the clock and want to give enough time for this topic because I want to talk about AI and I think the maturity of where everyone is with their adoption and how they’re embracing it and how they’re using it. Everyone’s in a different place. Let’s round robin on this topic and talk about how you’re embracing it, what, how you’re using it and how it’s improving your work. And Jen, do you want to kick us off with. I know you guys have really leaned into it. What is and how is it working for you?

0:35:20.6 Jen Brass Jenkins: We’ve tried it on a number of things just because you have to. You can’t just be like, I hope that it goes away because it’s not going away. I have found Persona generation to be helpful. We found a great prompt. I’m happy to hand it to anyone who wants it. It was from I think Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, that just you enter in and it says, like, tell me the hopes and dreams of someone experiencing this. What are the emotional triggers? And even though a lot of it was information, we knew just having it all there in one summary, is this age they work at this type of job. Here’s where they’re going, here’s what they’re doing. It was a great starting point for epilepsy site content and campaigns. We don’t put a lot of research oriented pieces on our healthcare site for patients. We found that patients don’t necessarily want to be considered pincushions. They’d rather something different. But for the epilepsy patient, research was going to make a difference in their care. They’re going to say, because epilepsy is a lot.

0:36:33.3 Jen Brass Jenkins: I don’t know the specifics on it, but I do know you have a seizure and it’s considered epilepsy. They are interested in research. There’s more to it that nobody knows. We are in the process of creating that and it was a gap that AI helped us identify. For gap analysis, it’s really helpful, I think.

0:36:53.7 Kirsten Lecky: Did you name your Persona?

0:36:57.0 Jen Brass Jenkins: They put a name on it. I’m currently, I’m so excited. I’m gonna try and gather some patient stories, maybe some interviews and try and maybe train as a next step, a particular AI channel and be like, you’re writing for this Persona.

0:37:15.0 Kirsten Lecky: That’s exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:37:17.1 Jen Brass Jenkins: There’s lots of things to do. But it was encouraging to find something that really helped us think about something in a different way.

0:37:23.4 Kirsten Lecky: Prompting it for one particular deliverable and then in training it to be like, I’m writing this for. And then you’ve got the Persona and being able to just really be repeat that work over what you, I think is really cool.

0:37:36.7 Jen Brass Jenkins: Yeah.

0:37:38.3 Kirsten Lecky: Dawn, how about you? I know you’re also really using AI. Tell us what you’re doing.

0:37:43.0 Dawn Weyant: Yeah. And I think as an organization and even as marketers, we’re still, you have to be using AI and we’re still leaning into figuring out how do we best use and leverage it. Right now we’re using it for a lot of administrative stuff, I have to say, is just helping us with sharing notes and things like that and being able to capture conversations and pieces like that. And we’re also exploring how do we leverage. Because we have to leverage it in our campaigns, in our content development. We’re on the edge of doing our research and trying to figure it out. I think also as an organization, we’re having the system is having the conversation, especially even on the medical and clinical side of the house. How are we leveraging AI for documentation, patient communications and things like that? Really taking a look at trying to figure out what tools are acceptable for clinical leadership as well?

0:38:51.5 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

0:38:53.7 Julie Levin: So are we. We’re in a little bit of a different spot because we work with donors who very often are patients. Unless we find programs that are HIPAA compliant, there’s optins to use it because it’s on the web and it lives on the web. We’re being selective like everyone else on how we’re using it. With that said, while I might not use it for a donor story or something along those lines, I do find it very effective as a proofreader. I find it very effective when we take our magazine content and we need to write social promos and email promos. I feel it’s very effective there and we do use it to give us a start. It’s not left to its own devices. Everything that we see, we do look at and tweak, but definitely the possibilities there are just so exciting. We just have to make sure that we’re staying true to our donors privacy and our patients privacy.

0:39:53.1 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, I think one of the things we were talking about too, I think Dawn, you used just this expression of we are a house of brands. Was that your expression where that is unique in academic environments. Where you have your college of medicine and you have your you and then you have the university and you have cancer centers often. I can almost picture like having these different AI agents or applications that brings all of those different brands and voices. What have you guys done in the meantime? Until we have that ideal state that helps us. What are some real best practices or things that you’ve learned to help navigate that complexity? Where you’ve got this house of brands, is it a real distinct…

0:40:39.8 Julie Levin: Centers, you mean? Yeah, it’s difficult because we’re in short, we’re writing for three different clients. I’m writing for the Miller, I’m writing for U Health. I’m writing full Sylvester. I’m writing for Bascom. And it’s very different. And there’s one member of my team that’s charged with doing nothing but branding because when we send out games and things along those nature, it all falls under the University of Miami. It’s the master brand. But there are some agencies where we do have a lockup brand, we use that. But it’s an ongoing, continuous thing that we have to look at and check back in with our marketing and comms folk and see what the policy is and how you work in campaigns. That’s another element. But and I’ll find our cancer center, because of a gift agreement, takes precedence over the University of Miami brand. There’s all kinds of things that you have to watch out for. But we take it we stay as close to the rule as we possibly can.

0:41:45.5 Kirsten Lecky: How about you, Jen? What have you learned and what are you doing to help bring one of continuity or sort of efficiencies around a house of brands that I’m sure you have to navigate.

0:41:55.9 Jen Brass Jenkins: We always maintain the university brand guidelines like you talk about, Julie, because as soon as we start branching out and creating all these house of brands, they take considerable support. Now, it doesn’t mean they’re not asking for it. There are things that will always be particular to a certain brand. And our marketing team uses an account based approach. You have the ortho person, you have the cancer person, you have so you have a matrix organization. Where everybody embeds and represents and does that thing. We’ve experimented with using a branded AI or an AI trained in our brand. It hasn’t turned out the results we would wish for. You really still need, I feel like people who represent that and can represent it and are embedded. You need the human aspect there. I would like to say one of my favorite quotes, which I told you, Kirsten, I think when we met was something along the lines of AI is the smartest, most amazing intern that you is a blank slate every time. You have to reenter, retrain it.

0:43:04.9 Kirsten Lecky: You have a different intern every day that shows up.

0:43:06.9 Jen Brass Jenkins: Yeah, because if you think about it, unless even if you do something that’s trained like yeah, it still has this thing where it’ll just suggest something. Oh, and by the way, I found this extra thing I’m going to throw in there for you, and it goes through so much data that keeping it in a smaller worldview, I think that in a frame or a construct is challenging.

0:43:33.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. This is related, unrelated. I think it was the Harvard Business Review or something or New York Times Today came out with an article and like, what are the top 10 ways that people are using AI today versus last year? Did any of you get. Jen, you’re nodding. Did you read that article?

0:43:47.2 Jen Brass Jenkins: I haven’t seen that yet.

0:43:48.1 Dawn Weyant: I haven’t seen it.

0:43:49.0 Kirsten Lecky: The number one thing today is they’re using it more for… I can’t remember exactly, but it was like therapy. It’s not like. Whereas last year at this time, it was ideation, brainstorming, outlining something along those lines. The number one slot today is like therapy. I’ll have to dig in and read Mental Health about that. But I was like, that’s really interesting.

0:44:13.4 Jen Brass Jenkins: Instead of being emotional support marketers, we can be like, I know you’re having a hard time with this. Go talk to our therapist AI agent that we’ve for you. And then…

0:44:23.4 Kirsten Lecky: Just remember you’re gonna have to tell your problem the next day because it’s a different therapist. Cause its a different therapist and on day three is a different therapist. We’ll just have to be telling our problems differently every single day for over and over. All right, well, those were great examples. I think those are good. And I think that you’re right, Jen too. And I know we all agree that it is more of an assistant. There’s a lot of, there’s certainly some application there, but really more on the time saving. It’s keeping those humans involved is certainly important. I noticed a question in here, but I think we’ve already addressed the question because the question was just examples of how marketing communication leaders work across space to close gaps across internal teams and use cases. I think we address that question. Let me look at the next one here.

0:45:13.0 Kirsten Lecky: Here’s a good one, what do you guys see an extension of that conversation around AI? What do you see as the biggest opportunities for marketing teams and AMCs next year or in the next year? What problems are they solving? What opportunities are they pursuing what’s the biggest opportunity as you think about the next year?

0:45:37.6 Jen Brass Jenkins: It’s so hard to wrangle in our current work.

0:45:41.1 Kirsten Lecky: I know, I know.

0:45:42.6 Dawn Weyant: And you almost have to say next…

0:45:46.0 Julie Levin: Is it through AI or just in general?

0:45:49.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, just in general doesn’t have to be AI.

0:45:53.9 Jen Brass Jenkins: I would say you have to look at it from a two to five year perspective personally, like, because every year for us is an iteration. We have set processes and projects. But then we’re going to use AI to continue to evolve how they affect our processes. But I’m really trying to push, my team, the user experience. For your audiences, where can we move the needle? And we’re constantly focused on that. And for our system right now we’re just, we don’t have enough facilities, we don’t have enough providers. And I try and maintain an even keel now and not bother too many people because I’d love to move forward and do all this stuff that I have. But the reality is for an academic medical center that you got to keep abreast of what’s going on and try and help your providers think about their patients in a slightly different way. How do they access the system?

0:46:50.9 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, yeah, I think we’re going to see like org charts changing maybe a little bit. Like are we going to be hiring for prompt engineers or. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see how that might be changing. Dawn, did you have something to add? What do you think is going to be that two to five year.

0:47:07.1 Dawn Weyant: Yeah, I think the two to five year it is getting aligned with, from our perspective, like what are those growth strategies that we can lean into and help with but then also addressing as a system access issues. That we have across our organization and how do we balance and throttle that with the system to help push people, not only nurture and maintain, sustain the patient population that we currently serve, but how do we capture and identify growth for us regionally in a way that makes sense and that we can support and maintain and sustain that patient experience.

0:47:55.1 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, yeah. And I think that is a nice. We just got a question and I think we have time for this last question and it’s along those and that is like how do you keep your teams motivated especially when the work gets harder, repetitive or like you were talking about capacity challenges and doing more with less. And any of you have any great best tips or best practices around keeping your teams motivated?

0:48:20.8 Julie Levin: Encouragement, new projects, get their buy in and things they want to try. If you notice somebody’s in a rut and is just doing one element of the job, I hold weekly touch points with them. How are you doing? What do you want to try? You good with your workload? Is there anything else you want to try? Because we touch so many different projects. I get their buy in. I try to give them ownership of things because I feel like that’s very important.

0:48:53.4 Jen Brass Jenkins: I’m working towards empowerment of my team so that they have more choices over the work that we have to do. It’s surprisingly difficult. I would go in and be like, I want to choose the project so you can’t tell me what to do. But when I leave it to them, they’re like, I’m not quite sure. I try and be like, here’s your strengths. Do you want to choose to grow in this area? Do you want to go try something with this team? Do you want to be embedded here? Which doesn’t mean they don’t get voluntold to do a lot of things. But the other thing I do is if it’s really crap work, right? Fixing broken legs is crappy work. And no, you can’t assign an intern to do it because they don’t know everything we know about where it needs to go or if it should be just killed. I go off on this rant. When a generative AI can fix broken links for me, then we will be in a good place. But I do the work with them. I’m like, we’re gonna fix it together. Is today like day? And we all sit and do it and it sucks and we’ll like do something.

0:50:01.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that empowerment too goes a long way. And willing to do the work with them. Anything to add Dawn on that one?

0:50:10.0 Dawn Weyant: No, I was going to use the same word which is empowering the people, and we’re in a unique environment. We’re 100% virtual. And really making sure that helping to keep people together. Especially when you think about marketing and communications people, we tend to be the extroverts. Being together and bringing the team together. For human touch. This is. We’re together and yet not just empowering people one to take opportunities, lean into training, professional development. On their own independently but then also coming back to our teams and just encouraging people to stand up and lean into things programs they want to start, launch own those sort of things.

0:51:00.9 Kirsten Lecky: Well, you guys are all amazing. I’m so glad you’re doing what you’re doing and that you’re not a landscape architect or a Bassett hound sanctuary owner or an artist. Now of course we can all do those things at some point in our lives but keep doing the good work because you guys are awesome. Thank you again for sharing all of your expertise and does the heart come up when you do that? I need to turn something on on mine because it doesn’t work.

0:51:24.7 Jen Brass Jenkins: It’s probably. It’s my favorite thing ever.

0:51:27.2 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. That is horrible. Wish you all well this afternoon.

0:51:31.0 Dawn Weyant: Thank you.

0:51:31.4 Kirsten Lecky: We’ll send out the recorded link and follow up questions if anyone has them and your contact information if they have any follow up questions. Appreciate it much.

0:51:39.1 Julie Levin: Thank you. Thank you.0:51:41.1 Jen Brass Jenkins: Bye.