Everyday Ideas

It seems, especially in health care, that we tend to get wrapped up in our day-to-day duties and the brainstorming and creativity of promoting our organizations online gets lost along the way. That’s why I feel it’s important to keep our eyes open in our everyday life and experiences, and draw ideas from places other than competitors and peers health organizations’ websites. On Valentine’s Day of this year, a local museum had a special event for the holiday. Participants were given admission to the museum with extras built into the evening for the attendees. At the end of the evening, participants were given a photo opportunity to round out their experience and have a memoir of the Valentine’s event. Instead of hiring a professional photographer, the museum took advantage of the photo sharing Web site Flickr, and with a low budget camera, around $300-$500, a free souvenir was created for the holiday evening. The event organizers had set up a Flickr account prior to the evening, and choose photo borders with a Valentine theme for attendees to chose. Some organizations will use a low-budget backdrop for photographs, but the museum chose to take photos in front of a white wall, which easily fit with the photo borders chosen from Flickr for the event. An email address and password were provided to attendees to retrieve the photograph from Flickr. Photographs were loaded to the site at the end of the evening and available for retrieval the next day. When I saw this idea I immediately thought what a great idea for an easy and inexpensive way for a health care organization to add to the promotion of areas throughout its organization. I believe this example could be applied to many different areas of health care organizations. Foundations could use this approach at fund-raising events such as galas, holiday events, etc. Service lines could use this example to promote community and hospital classes. Creating these environments and pushing the organization out into new and unconventional (at the moment) spaces is just another way of reaching an audience. Not to mention, if used and integrated correctly could potentially help boost SEO rankings, which is another topic for another day. As for everyday ideas, do you have any examples that have gone over well at your organization that started from an idea you ran across from your own personal experiences?