Webinar: Mastering the art of healthcare marketing report writing

0:00:00.5 Lauran McHaffie: All right, we’re gonna go ahead and get started in the essence of time. Thank you for joining us today. I am Lauran McHaffie, and this is our webinar, Mastering the Art of Healthcare Report Writing. Before we get started, we just have a few housekeeping things. We want to be respectful of your time, and we will wrap up today’s webinar in 30 minutes. We encourage you to ask questions using the Q&A. It’s at the bottom of the Zoom screen. And time permitting, we’ll answer those questions at the end. If we don’t get to that, we certainly will answer them at the end or via email. And today’s webinar will be recorded. Just a bit about us at WG Content. We build lasting relationships and create meaningful content with our client partners.

0:00:45.4 Lauran McHaffie: Our team has decades of content strategy, writing, and design experience, helping our clients achieve their marketing and communication goals one word at a time. Speaking of words, you’re about to meet two of our savvy communicators. In today’s webinar about healthcare report writing, you will meet two seasoned writers. They are very familiar with report writing and hope to spark some creative ideas for your next poll. But before we go there, let’s, I have a poll, or next poll, next report, excuse me. Here’s a question for you, the part I dread most about reports is? So go ahead and put your answers in there. You can just fill that through and I will continue introducing Leigh and Dama. Leigh Wilkins has been writing content for healthcare reports for her entire medical writing career, which spans three decades.

0:01:45.4 Lauran McHaffie: She knows all too well how boring reports can be and is always looking for eye-catching ways to spice up the production process and content. Dama Ewbank has been involved in report writing and production her entire career as well. At WG, she has worked on several annual accomplish and donor reports for academic medical centers and regional health systems. Leigh and Dama are excited to share some lessons they’ve learned and they will be also sharing some examples today. So Dama, take it away. I’m gonna go ahead and end this pool.

0:02:21.7 Dama Ewbank: Thank you so much, Lauran. I’m really excited to be here today. I’m particularly excited to be here with Leigh. She and I began our time at WG Content just a few months apart back in 2019. And one of our first projects together was a large accomplishments report. So we have great experience working together on these types of projects. And we’re really excited to share the unique challenges that come with them, with planning and writing annual reports. And we’re excited to share what we’ve learned about setting teams up for success and the pre-work that makes the hard work so much easier, getting the most out of every piece of content and making your report a must read, overcoming common pitfalls and problems, and of course, how to avoid them, and then extending your report’s value through expanding your thinking around distribution.

0:03:07.9 Dama Ewbank: If we have time today, we’ll answer some questions of yours and we’ll be sure to share examples along the way. What we won’t share today, we’re not gonna tackle budget. We have lots of tips and tricks to share with you today that we think we’ll work with really within any budget size. And we won’t dive into design. We are writers and we know a little bit about project management and we offer some design suggestions as we work, but we aren’t gonna share a lot about design today. But before we get started, Lauran, can you share what we learned in our first poll? All right. So getting stakeholders on the same page is what most people are dreading about annual reports. Do you agree with that, Leigh?

0:03:53.2 Leigh Wilkins: Well, I do. I do. But I would say the thing I dread most is collecting all the visuals. I’m just not in that mode when I’m writing. And I tend to save that collection of photos and graphics toward the end. And by then, I just want to be done. So that’s probably the thing I dread the most.

0:04:12.7 Dama Ewbank: Got it. I think I’m kind of in the same dreading space as these poll answers. I really kind of dread the approval process, which I think is kind of getting people on the same page, but more towards the end of the process. So yeah. So really what you can do to set your teams up for success so you don’t have to dread your annual report are really, it’s really a lot about the pre-work. And so we’re gonna talk about that pre-work today. And a big part of your pre-work is all about knowing your purpose. There are lots of different types of annual report and they’re really all centered around your purpose. And we think about annual reports around annual updates, community benefit reports, impact reports, accomplishments reports, reputation building reports when you’re working on things like increasing your rankings for US News and World Report.

0:05:00.9 Dama Ewbank: So we really think it’s important to know your purpose for your hard work. Is your annual report a requirement? Do you owe something for an accreditation? Do you have to prove a community benefit? Or is it for good stewardship? Do you owe a report to a donor or a funding agency? With our combined experience, we really think it’s important to tell you that if you can, if you can avoid it, actually, don’t create a report for the sake of creating one. Figure out your purpose and then let that drive the work that you do. So here’s an example of a report from Bon Secours Mercy Health. This is their community benefit report, just a part of it. This really is a good example of someone who really understood their purpose. They didn’t have to make it really fancy.

0:05:44.7 Dama Ewbank: They understood their purpose. They kept each page the same, but they met their requirement and did what they needed to do and really accomplished what they set out to do, which was create a community benefit report, which was a requirement. So setting the stage for success also requires that you build a timeline and it’s really important to just work back to the beginning from publishing deadlines. Really think about your review process. Where is it gonna take a lot of time? What could hold you up? Usually with the legal review process, that’s where we find a lot of sticking points. And then communicate that with your teams. Make sure that anyone who’s part of the review process knows that they’re gonna be part of it, when they can expect to be part of it. Miami Cancer Institute does a great job of this.

0:06:21.8 Dama Ewbank: They set their teams up for success by telling them well in advance when they expect copy to come their way, how long they’ll have for review so they know what’s coming and they’re not surprised. And then not to be confused with your production timeline is your reporting time frame. You really need to decide early on whether you’re gonna report on your fiscal year, your calendar year, and then do your best to stick to that time frame. Give yourself a cutoff. Once it’s established, don’t deviate. It’ll set you up for future success story. Don’t be tempted by a really juicy story that falls outside of your reporting time frame. You don’t wanna ruin it for next year. Stick with your timeframe, stick to it. So Leigh, you’re gonna talk with us now about some important next steps in that pre-work process.

0:07:07.3 Leigh Wilkins: That’s right. All right. But first, Lauran, let’s put up the second poll. The question is, how long was your most recent annual report? All right. So while we wait for the poll results, let’s get started with three steps for setting the stage for success. And the first one is identify your audience. So we kind of alluded to this with the purpose of your report, but your audience could be community. It could be donors. It could be physicians and researchers. And it’s good to have a primary audience that the report speaks to. You can certainly have secondary audiences, but that primary audience should really drive a lot of the content focus. Dama and I work on a report where the client just could not settle on a primary audience. So the audience became everybody. And it included articles from the housekeeping staff, accounts payable, business ops. And this was just an annual report.

0:08:02.3 Leigh Wilkins: And it was sort of like Oprah, like you get a story and you get a story. But by the end, that report was 104 pages. So let’s see what our poll results were, Lauran. What were the results? All right, 25 plus, hopefully not 100 pages, but sometimes you can’t help it, and you’ve got to make it a long report. So when you can, though, good to keep it concise and focused to your audience. So this is a report from Cincinnati Children’s, and it’s an accomplishments report, a reputation builder, and this is last year’s nephrology report. The audience here is physicians and researchers, and so that really gave writers focus. We knew we could write at a high level. They knew they could cover complex topics, didn’t have to over explain a lot of the terms because the audience would be very familiar. You can see the report highlights photos of faculty and profiles within and profiles of their work.

0:09:06.4 Leigh Wilkins: And so that was cool because the audience, many would know the physicians and researchers featured in this report. They would know them from their training or from conferences. So it’s kind of a small community, pediatric nephrologists. So it was an easy report to write in that sense, very focused. And a layperson would not find these articles interesting, but they weren’t our audience. So that was okay. The next key to success is to find a theme, and a theme is gonna provide you with cohesiveness. It helps readers get at a glance what it’s about. It makes reports more memorable, and it helps writers craft articles in a more focused way. So it can be something general like a year of innovation, or it could be something maybe that builds off of your marketing message. So there’s a local hospital, their tagline is “here for you”.

0:09:58.0 Leigh Wilkins: So their annual report theme could be something like here for you in 2024. This next slide is from a newsletter, actually looks like a newsletter. It’s an annual report that I wrote as a freelancer almost 10 years ago for Otterbein, which is a senior residential facility here in Ohio. And the audience here was the residents and the marketing team knew that seniors were not gonna be interested in traditional annual reports. So They went with a newspaper theme, and it was really fun. We had an arts and entertainment section, a sports section, a health and quality section. It allowed us to include all the necessary information, but in a really visually engaging way, and it was very well received by the audience. Another example, and I don’t have a visual, is a report Dama and I worked on earlier this year for a research institution.

0:10:53.6 Leigh Wilkins: The client wanted the theme to be focused on the quadruple aim of healthcare. So the way we carried that out throughout the whole report was to create a checklist graphic with four items, one for each aim. So patient experience, population health, healthcare costs, and provider experience. And then with every article, we had the checklist and we would check which of the quadruple aims that story, that program covered. And so that provided a lot of cohesiveness and it emphasized something really important to the client. Our third step in setting the stage is to assemble a team. And here, as a writer, I can tell you that not all writers are created equal. So you wanna look at what your report audience and purpose is to see what type of writer you need, or writers. So if your audience is physicians and researchers, you want medical writing experience.

0:11:46.2 Leigh Wilkins: If your audience is more the general public, you want feature stories. So I know most marketing departments don’t have a vast stable of writers with lots of broad experience, but WG content does. We have over 100 writers and so when we are assigned a report of some kind, the project manager can really pick and choose from that big selection of writers to see who’s the best fit. All right, so now your behind the scenes pre-work is pretty much done and Dama is gonna cover how to select stories and get the most out of every article and report. But before that, it’s time for another poll. And the question here is, how important is it to have a message from the CEO in your annual report?

0:12:35.8 Dama Ewbank: Thanks, Leigh. I’m really excited to hear the answer to this question because it’s a really nice lead into our next topic, must haves and nice haves. So when I think about annual reports, I think about what what has to be included and what can’t be left out. So, Lauran, do we have answers for this poll yet? How important is it to include a message from the CEO? A must have, about 41%, depends on the year and the CEO, about 47%. So those are interesting responses. I think we see it varies from report to report, actually. And what I have found is that over time in my work on these types of projects, the letter from the CEO might still exist, but it’s actually gotten a little bit shorter over time. Maybe people don’t feel like it needs to be a full page, just a smaller message here and there.

0:13:25.0 Dama Ewbank: But I don’t think it’s going away completely anytime soon. So thinking about what can’t be left out, that’s really gonna be a decision that you and your key stakeholders are going to be talking through as you work through your content. But what you also want to consider is what can be included, if at all possible. So annual report, it’s a dumping ground for content. But what can you include there that you might not be able to include maybe throughout the year in other publications? How can you highlight people or programs that don’t get a lot of other attention throughout the year? And that’s a really good place to put that kind of information. An annual report just, it ends up being a really good place for that type of information. So now we’re gonna talk about something that’s really near and dear to our hearts as writers, and that is story assignments. Leigh.

0:14:16.1 Leigh Wilkins: All right. So when you’re signing stories, It’s so important to give the writer as much information as possible. I’m sometimes surprised by the scant amount of information that we receive. And sometimes that’s unavoidable. Marketing just isn’t sure what the SME is gonna wanna talk about. But our guidance here is to collect as much information about each story as you possibly can. That’ll go either in an email to the project manager and writer or perhaps a detailed content brief. It should fully describe what the story is about. It should include any resource materials you have, links to more information, and even some backstory, like if you know that the SME is hard to reach or reluctant to talk about the topic or something like that. It’s just helpful context for writers. I have recently gotten guidance that went something like this.

0:15:09.4 Leigh Wilkins: Dr. Harris wants to talk about recent advancements in congenital heart surgery, defect surgery in 2024. And it’s just so hard to prepare for an interview when that’s the kind of information you get. And sometimes it’s hard for the SME because they don’t really know what you’re looking for either. So any guidance you can give is always welcome. And then you wanna think about as you pull your stories together, making your report as a whole a want to read. And that has a lot to do with making it visually interesting and writers have a lot to do with it. So it is tempting, as Dama said, to just stuff an annual report with all kinds of information where it feels like a dumping ground. It doesn’t have to be that way. And you don’t even have to have super detailed articles.

0:15:58.0 Leigh Wilkins: The guidance about readability is still important, even in an annual report, even in a long one. So you want the content to be visually appealing and interesting. Just bearing in mind that attention spans are short these days. The content should be digestible, scannable, meaning chunks of copy, not real long, meaning a lot of white space, a lot of paragraphs. It should be variable. The formats of your story should be variable. And so one thing that we like to play with as writers is considering different formats. And I’m gonna give some examples in a minute, but just as an overview, one format for your annual report story could be a patient story or an employee or volunteer profile. Instead of just talking about a doctor’s work, you could do a case study about their work or about a patient.

0:16:46.9 Leigh Wilkins: You can do a Q&A with the SME. You can do articles that are ghost written, but have a physician byline. And then you can even think, does everything in this report really need to be an article? Can we just have some cool visuals with extended captions, which are so easy to read and scan and pictures, of course, add so much life to a report. So speaking of which, in our next slide, we have patient stories. So this is from Baptist Health Marcus Neuroscience Institute in Florida. And their annual report was just packed with some really great, interesting patient stories and really makes the content approachable. And then we have on our next slide, this is from Miami Cancer Institute’s report. And they used a lot of infographics and photos of employees. And this was on a page for their pharmacy department, which is an inherently interesting topic for most readers probably, but I feel like they really brought it to life here with the photos, with the infographics.

0:17:51.8 Leigh Wilkins: So even if nobody read the articles, they would at least get a sense of the sheer volume of work that the pharmacy did and get a sense of how busy they are and what an impact they make in patient care. And so we really like when the client gives us some freedom to share what we think would be good infographics or photos or illustrations. And Sometimes SMEs have great ideas for that. And this next example is from Cincinnati Children’s. These are actually two examples. So this is an example on the left of a Q&A with a couple of doctors. And I think Q&As are just so readable. I love writing and reading them. And then on the right, we have a story about responsive neurostimulation for seizures. And we felt like a patient story here was a good way to go. It kind of engaged audiences. And both of these publications are for physicians and researchers.

0:18:48.3 Leigh Wilkins: One is actually a newsletter report and the one on the left I use it and as an example. But we feel like even an accomplishments report should be very engaging and interesting, even though doctors and researchers are used to reading scientific studies, like we love to spice it up with just some interesting formats for them. And so in this next slide, I just wanna talk briefly about how clients can tee up story assignments for writers and SMEs. A lot of that has to do with communication and setting expectations. And so for SMEs, it’s so helpful when the client sends out a warm email handoff that CCs the writer and shares in the email what the publication is about, what the article is about, that we’re featuring their work. And it just starts that conversation with the SME. And then sometimes questions arise, but at least the writers in on the process and can ask their own questions of the physician before or SME before everything is officially handed off into the interview phase.

0:19:56.2 Leigh Wilkins: And then of course, you don’t have to do it that way. You could just let the SME know separately that the writer is gonna reach out. But that’s always helpful instead of them just getting a surprise email from us. And then for writers, we already talked about the importance of a content brief or an introductory email describing the article, but I wanna add too that it’s so helpful to include the SMEs admin contact information because admins can be so helpful in setting up interviews and expediting the review process. And then my last note here for teeing it up with writers is, if you have multiple writers on a report, it’s really good to have a face-to-face or obviously Teams or Zoom conversation with the client and with the writers. So everybody’s on the same page. Everybody knows the expectation and the writers have a chance to ask questions. ‘Cause questions always come up and they’re often the same questions. So it can just save time to have everybody in on a conversation right up front. And now I’m going to hand it off to Dama, who’s going to talk about writers speaking up.

0:21:01.4 Dama Ewbank: Yeah, thanks Leigh. And those are really good tips because I had a situation last spring in a report where I got on the phone with the SME and I had an expectation that we were talking about one thing and he had a desire to talk about something else. And so we ended up having to do the interview and then redo the interview. So it was a real waste of time for him and probably very frustrating. So those expectations are really important. So you’re the writer on an annual report project, and your project manager has set you up nicely with all the tips that Leigh has just brought up. Do now it’s up to you as a writer to be really straightforward and be a communicator. So you have to report back regularly with your project manager and talk about obstacles, share issues with scheduling, talk about concerns or questions that you have that the SME has raised.

0:21:52.6 Dama Ewbank: And then also share ideas that you have for making the story better, making visuals, better ideas for callouts and sidebars. All of this is just gonna make the annual report all that much better for you, for the client, for everyone involved. So, next topic, pitfalls and challenges. We know that these projects are not easy and there are gonna be problems along the way. We’ve certainly encountered them and we have some tips for avoiding them or addressing them as they come. So, challenge number one, lack of organization. Oftentimes you begin a project like this and there’s no system for storing or naming information. There’s no way to handle versioning. You can save yourself a lot of time from the start if you establish these processes from the beginning. And it’s even good to just do this now before you’ve even been assigned an annual report project, because I can tell you from just my own experience, you will be assigned one at one point in your career if you don’t have one right now somebody’s gonna come to your desk and ask you to create an annual report or a report of some kind at some point.

0:22:57.1 Dama Ewbank: So begin that. Begin thinking now about organization. Begin that planning process now. Don’t wait for that moment. Anticipate that request. This is a group out of Miami Cancer Institute, their foundation team. And they anticipate the annual report requests every year. They collect photos and information from their events every year, and they’re ready as soon as someone reaches out to them to say what’s happened over the past year. They have all their information ready to hand off quickly, and it’s so wonderful.

0:23:29.3 Dama Ewbank: So challenge number two on a similar note is just difficulty gathering content. You don’t have to start from scratch. Most of the content that you can include in your annual report likely already exists somewhere on your website, on your blog, on your social channels. Do an audit of what exists, gather what you can, and then plan from there what you need to create from scratch. Leigh what is challenge number three?

0:23:52.0 Leigh Wilkins: Challenge number three is report bloat. So that’s when things get out of control with your report in terms of the kind of just sheer volume of articles or visuals or pages. And there is a tendency with an annual report to just throw in this chart, throw in this patient story, throw in this repurposed article, and it can take things in a very unfocused direction. So most importantly, just keep coming back to your report’s purpose and audience. Finalize your outline in page count early and really try to stick with it, which it’s hard, it’s hard to say no, especially when SMEs are expressing enthusiasm about being included. And you wanna include everybody and you just have to find other ways to do that. Maybe you can defer their idea to a different publication later in the year.

0:24:50.1 Leigh Wilkins: Always provide clear story direction to the writer and SME and enforce those word counts very important. Although writers don’t like that, it is important. And then it’s okay you will have to pivot on certain stories, like Dama was giving that example. There are times when an SME has a better idea or just a different idea, and it’s okay to pivot, but building in a little extra time to have the freedom to do that is good. And then we did have an experienced Dama, I could think it was a couple years ago when we did have to say no to a really great idea.

0:25:22.4 Dama Ewbank: Yeah, we were working with a group of nurses and they had an idea to really kind of weave some of their work in with other report sections throughout their cancer institute. And it was a great idea because they were working with others throughout the institute and it made a lot of sense, but it just wasn’t gonna work out with either the timing or the work we were doing on the report. But hopefully it’s something that they can consider in future annual reports. Yeah. All right, challenge number four, Leigh.

0:25:46.0 Leigh Wilkins: Challenge number four. Our final challenge is when you experience radio silence from SMEs or reviewers or other reviewers. So in this situation it happens like all the time. As, we all know a warm handoff does help a lot. It just establishes the importance of the publication. And I think too many people do consider it an honor for their work to be featured in an annual report or any kind of report your department does. And so really emphasizing that, I think helps people prioritize the review process. So admins, as I mentioned, are your allies in scheduling and in the review process. And then something I’ve just found the courage to do, probably in the last five years of my career, most recent five years of my career, is following up with SMEs by text. So if they’ve given me their cell phone or somehow I have it, I will use it to follow up to just like get things moving.

0:26:44.2 Leigh Wilkins: And I find that SMEs are usually very receptive to that. In fact, Dama had an experience where that’s the only way the doctor wanted to communicate was by text. So you never know. And it doesn’t hurt to try if you’re getting borderline desperate. And then if things are slow you can always, it’s not happening. You can always suggest alternatives like should I have another colleague interview not interview, but review this for us or would you prefer to respond in writing to my questions? That sort of thing. And so for our last section, Dama’s gonna talk about giving your report legs, take it away.

0:27:20.7 Dama Ewbank: Okay. Yeah, thanks Leigh. We’re running really tight on time, so I’m gonna go quickly. But once your report is underway or you’re moving things along, how do you gotta think about your distribution. So, and how you can extend your reports value. So of course you’re gonna think about your primary audience first and how they plan to and expect to receive your report. And that should be your primary distribution channel. But really then think about how you can gain extra value by sharing your report in other ways and extending it to other audiences.

0:27:46.9 Dama Ewbank: Think about how you can show your report online through social media, via email, through your internal and external publications, blog posts, maybe even advertorials. Make your report part of your editorial calendar and use content from it throughout your year. Get every inch of value out of it that you can, you’ve put a lot of work into it. And this is just one way that St. Elizabeth Healthcare in Northern Kentucky extends their value. They put their community health needs assessment and community benefit reports online.

0:28:15.7 Leigh Wilkins: Yeah. Thank you.

0:28:15.8 Dama Ewbank: So Leigh, key takeaways.

0:28:18.2 Leigh Wilkins: Alright, I will bring us home. So our key takeaways are know your reports, purpose and audience. Focus on communication with all parties. Make your report a want to read by including visually interesting components and shorter stories when you can. And then extend your reports value. ’cause as Dama says, you work so hard on it and you really wanna get as much mileage out of it as you can. Dama and I cover these takeaways and much more and a report that Lauran will tell you about as she wraps us up.

0:28:50.2 Lauran McHaffie: All right, thank you so much. That was really great. But we really appreciate your insights, your sharing your guidance. And that was just so nice and thorough. We don’t have any time for questions, but there will be an opportunity if you do have one in the survey that you can certainly ask us afterwards. But thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your time and your attention. You will have the recording in your inbox that will be sent to you as also these 10 tips that we Leigh just referred to as a takeaway that you can download.0:29:22.1 Lauran McHaffie: There is a survey, so as you exit out just a three question survey, please it take just a moment and fill that out for us just to help us with insights as we move forward in our webinars. And then join us next month on Halloween for our conversation with Bon Secours Mercy Health and Roper St. Francis Healthcare, who will explore how investments in content, brand messaging, and internal comms can enhance employee experience. We’ll share details on LinkedIn and you’ll also get that via email. And we did it, it’s 30 minutes. Thank you all for joining us. We will see you in October.