Mike Stephenson works in his office at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital where he leads a team of writing, digital content and multimedia specialists.
Mike's marketing and communications career
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital
Mike left the newspaper industry after 23 years at the Tampa Bay Times and joined another leading institution in the Tampa Bay region, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, the leading pediatric hospital on Florida’s west coast. Mike was charged with enhancing a brand journalism strategy designed to build the hospital’s goodwill in the community and promote its expertise both clinically and in research and education, newer areas since the hospital became the first outside the Baltimore/Washington region to become a member of the Johns Hopkins Health System.
In the fall of his first year, Mike edited an edition of For the Kids magazine, a publication of the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Foundation, was selected among more than 4,000 entries as a Silver Winner by the Healthcare Advertising Awards, the oldest, largest and most widely respected health care advertising awards competition. Despite being new to the hospital and the health care industry, Mike also contributed to developing the hospital’s brand voice guidelines and created the editorial style guide for the organization.
In calendar year 2018, Mike and his team drove a 68 percent year-over-year improvement of views to hospital's news pages. Page views have continued an upper trajectory from there. Often, our stories lead to media coverage.
Digital content specialists on Mike’s team also create programs and services pages, physician bios and collateral materials for the website. In fiscal year 2019 (July 1, 2018-June 30, 2019), the team grew page views on the site by more than 24 percent and updated more than 2,000 pages of content for 44 service lines.
Moments
When the hospital encountered negative media attention in 2018, Mike and his team played a lead role in telling the “tiny moments that tell a larger story of care and compassion” at the hospital. The Moments campaign — mostly told with words and pictures and occasionally with video — was designed with a distinctive look, feel and style to be easy to consume and encourage readers to come back for more. The stories are short, generally 300 words or fewer, and told in present tense, as if the scene is unfolding as you read it.
The Moments series went from conception to execution in a matter of days. At first, Mike did substantial editing and rewriting as writers adjusted to the brevity and style he sought. But the writers adapted and the team published new Moments seven days a week for the first month, something the hospital never had attempted before.
People throughout the hospital campus and the community responded enthusiastically. One nurse was inspired to submit a first-person Moment of his interaction with a patient. Total page views of Moments on the website for four weeks were 12,807, which doesn’t include people who read Moments through our emails and Facebook where we published the Moments in full given their brevity. People often read a Moment and then clicked through to read one or two more. The average page views for each visitor ranged from 1.87 to 2.48 over the four weeks.
The series earned honorable mention in the Ragan/PR Daily Content Marketing Content Series competition in 2019. After the first month, the series shifted to weekly publication and continues. (See Management Case Study for more.)
MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES:
Mike applied his editorial experience at the hospital while expanding his knowledge of marketing campaigns and video. Some examples: