By Jonathan W. Brown, Indian Stream Health Center
In April of 2011, I dreamed the wild notion that our health center, Indian Stream Health Center, would create and submit a video for NACHC’s National Health Center Week competition. I had seen that NACHC sponsored such an event the year before, but during 2010 our health center was in the midst of a renovation and expansion project from funding we had received through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the entire organization was consumed with that project.
So, beginning in May 2011, my IT assistant (Allie White) and I began brainstorming a video to submit in the 2011 NACHC Video Contest. Our state Primary Care Association had put out a YouTube video titled “16 minutes” a few months earlier discussing “the positive impact that New Hampshire’s Community Health Centers have had on their communities, as well as the challenges they face.” This video inspired us to tell our health center’s story and at the same time submit it to NACHC’s video contest, with a local-feel and a light comedic spin.
Never did I imagine the amount of work it would take to put something like this together. We polled staff and worked with our management team to come up with ideas. We asked for volunteer actors and put together a storyboard. Filming was done throughout our community and at our Health Center during business hours and non business hours. At some stages of filming the two of us were filming with three different cameras and we accumulated about 16 hours of raw footage (to be condensed to a three minute video). The entire months of June and July were spent filming and editing right up until the July 29, 8:00pm EDT deadline.
This project was a zero-dollar endeavor using free applications for editing and royalty-free music from the Internet. We didn’t have the technology, video lenses, or techniques to produce a cinema quality film. So instead of going for Oscar winning effects, we began to rely heavily on the message rather than the process. Our storyboard went from humorous and dramatic, to pure and real. There was no smoke and mirrors, only real people, portraying real difficulties that they face every day. And real providers showing them that dependable care really can be accessed in the most rural of places.
We were very anxious to find out if our video had been selected as a finalist and were very excited when we were notified it had been. Once the videos were open to voting we spent the first few days sitting back watching each video receive votes. I remember casting the first “like” for our video. I also remember watching two videos in particular begin to accumulate many more votes than ours. There was a health center from Hawaii and another from California whose videos were excellent. Their populations, I imagine, are much larger than our own, and their videos were quickly amassing Facebook “likes”. In Colebrook, NH where our health center is located, we have a population of about 2,200. One of our board members e-mailed me the population of the city the California Health Center is located in; with a population almost six times larger than our entire county, I figured we had no chance to collect the most Facebook “likes”.
Something I’ve learned from this experience which I think is an important message to all health centers, rural and urban, is that social media is a great tool to share your message. Our health center staff and board worked tirelessly to connect with friends and strangers through social media and I believe our efforts paid off. This video project has enabled the health center to share our story and gain some recognition on a national stage. We received votes for our video from neighbors, friends, staff, colleagues, and strangers across the country. What NACHC has enabled us to do, comes straight from their mission statement, and that is “to promote the provision of high quality, comprehensive and affordable health care that is coordinated, culturally and linguistically competent…”
NACHC has developed a fun and educational program through National Health Center Week and the National Health Center Advocate Video Contest. But what’s great about the video contest is the experience of using social media and other outlets that Community Health Centers might not tend to gravitate to. I’ve seen our website and Facebook page visits increase significantly over the course of this contest and hope to keep the momentum moving forward. I’ve personally seen a huge number of my own Facebook friends, many of whom have no connection to my health center or Community Health Centers in general, learn something about health centers, and that exposure is tremendous for us.
In a conversation, Allie stated “I think the video was a learning experience in many ways. Not only did I become aware of how a Patient Centered Medical Home operates and provides services to community members, but I was able to send that message to the public through a media that everyone can understand: human relationships and interactions.” So, not only did we engage the community to learn more about the community health centers, as staff we also gained more insight into what it is we do and why we do it.
It’s been a great deal of fun using social media to connect people with the Community Health Center mission. No matter the results of the video contest, I think each of the health centers that submitted a video have won, through national recognition for their hard work in creating a video and for the local support of community members who were involved in the creation of their project. Regardless of the medium in which Community Health Centers deliver their message, what’s truly important is that we deliver that message and get it out to as many people as possible.
Here’s a Community Health Center in a frontier community growing Community Health Center support with social media one Facebook user at a time!