Useful Advice from those People in Finance
| How do you make a case for your communications budget? Here are some suggestions based on a recent conversation with a local hospital's financial vice president: - Keep yourself well informed about your organization's goals and finances. If you don't know it already, find out what your overall marketing budget is.
- Know your hospital's strategic plan, and tie your own plan to the plan's major goals.
- At the half-year point, if not more often, your hospital will evaluate performance, and adjust spending as needed. This means that you should be monitoring your own results so you're prepared to make a case for your continued funding.
- On the other hand, it can be hard to figure out a return on investment for an advertising or communications campaign. One thing that can help: at the very start of planning a campaign, set ROI goals and monitor them.
- The emergency department and primary care make sense as activities to publicize, because they attract attention. If you are planning to publicize other departments, make your case for their significance to the hospital's goals. Patient surveys can be helpful in deciding what to emphasize in your marketing efforts.
- Be realistic about the significance of a small expenditure. From finance's point of view, $1,000 to beef up a mailing, or get help from a designer or writer, is a very small percentage of a typical community hospital's marketing budget.
See below for more about help with financing your communications.
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Help with Your Business Plan
Know you need a communications business plan but wondering how to put one together? Contact me for a free, 45-minute consultation.
Your new fiscal year may not be very far away. It's a good idea to begin thinking about how to shape next year's communications plan, including the costs!
During our 45-minute, complimentary session, you can review what's gone well and what your hopes, and concerns, are for 2011.
Email me or call me at 617.489.1834.
See you in October!
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Jane Sherwin is a professional writer specializing in marketing materials for the health care field. In addition to in-depth articles, brochures and web content, she also provides e-mail marketing services. Visit WordDriveCommunications.com for more information.
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Testimonial: We're an organization that tries to help everyone, and we'd never worked with an outside writer before. You were willing to talk about a lot of things, and very patient and open to suggestions and changes. Our new brochure looks good and tells our story.-Anne Aisenberg, Community Day Center of Waltham, MA
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Learning about E-mail Marketing
| If you'd like me to speak with your group about using e-mail to build your community or your business, e-mail me or give me a call at 617.489.1834.
I'm offering two evening classes on how to make the best use of that amazing tool, the e-mail newsletter: Sept. 14 in Worcester, MA & Oct. 5 in Belmont.
The Central MA Secondary Schools Administrators Association has invited me to speak on email communications between schools, family and community, on Oct. 7.
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