Shriners Children’s Philadelphia

Stories I’ve written for the hospital

While story writing is only a component of the work I do at Shriners Children’s, I’ve been able to have a decent amount of stories published. Below is a mix of patient stories, board member mini-biographies, and hospital features, and donor stories I’ve written. Click on each below to view the full story!

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Design work

One of the main components of my position is graphic design for the hospital. I’ve created career ads, SEPTA ads, social media graphics, physician oneheets for our physician liaison team, hospital rack cards, and a feel good mock yearbook as an HR employee engagement material.

Masonic Village at Elizabethtown

Best pieces from my public relations associate internship

Below is a small visual sample of the articles and blogs I wrote during my internship at Masonic Villages. Clicking on each will take you to either the Issuu page or directly to the blog post. Overall, I wrote well over 25 blog posts during my time there. Most of them revolved around healthcare and hospice topics, as our Hospice and Home Health websites were recently launched and needed content.

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Crisis Communication Plan

The goal of the project was to get everyone thinking about what needs to happen in the event of a communications crisis at any of the Masonic Village campuses. Each Masonic Village already had their campus-specific Emergency Preparedness Plan, but our Director of Public Relations, Tina Lutter, wanted a plan just for our office. In the case that she, or multiple senior team members, were unavailable to immediately handle a situation, she wanted a plan that anyone could look at and know where to start in handling a crisis.

I had asked about how Masonic Villages handles communication crises during the final interview for my internship hiring, and that started the process for me being able to work on this project during my internship. 

To start this project, I did as much research into crisis communications as I possibly could: I reviewed old lecture notes and projects I completed in university, looked at case studies and media relations procedures from other retirement communities and talked with department team members to get a better idea about what should be included. I then created an outline and proposal for the plan and held a meeting with Tina to get guidance on the next steps.

Things I learned while making the plan

1. Any bad thing that happens to an organization is a crisis. Originally, I was planning on breaking down the different crisis that Masonic Villages could encounter into a "crisis severity" section that would rate the scope and overall damage of a crisis on a high, medium, low scale. While this sounds good in practice (and what many other CCPs seem to include), Tina decided this wasn’t the right approach for our department. She summed it up in a very succinct way: "When a crisis happens, it IS the worst thing that could happen. There's no such thing as a low-level crisis."
   
   I then took this severity categorization and transformed it into a "whom will this crisis affect, and whom do we need to get information from" categorization. The categorizations were now things like: resident-centered, employee-centered, healthcare, environmental, financial, etc. Through these new categorizations, we could then have a list of key team members and their contact information who would have immediate knowledge about that kind of situation.
   
   

2. A process is better than a plan. In the way I had initially envisioned the plan, crises were categorized by severity and each category was going to have its own holding statement and media kit to handle the situation. But through my meetings and talks with department members, I learned a very important aspect of crisis communication plans: they're only used if they're useful.
   
   Real life is messy and situations are never what we expect. So how could we possibly have a holding statement for every kind of situation? While they may be useful in many general applications, they may not even be touched during a specific crisis. While a plan and holding statement might be a good idea for the situations they are designed for, a crisis communication process provides a path for an entire department to follow in order handle any situation regardless of severity. (We did still opt to create a media kit, but not holding statements. Since MV already had an Emergency Preparedness Plan with fact sheets about campus, we just added updated leadership bios to the kit and process).

Final thoughts

This project allowed me to work with leadership from different departments across our organization. Part of the plan incorporated key team members from each of the five Masonic Village campuses, so I had to coordinate with each executive office to obtain information regarding organizational structure to find exactly who our department should contact in a crisis. 

I learned a great amount about crisis communications working on this, and it definitely taught me a lot about how a communication department works and the tools they need to handle crises. While the plan is finished, I will not be sharing a copy of the particular plan because of the sensitive nature of personal contact information in it. But here is a great resource I used if you want to learn more about crisis communication planning.