University of Pennsylvania Health System
Print and Digital Publishing: External Audience
Silver
Penn Medicine magazine shines a light on some of the most extraordinary advances in medical science, transformations of health care, and the people behind them. In the last two years, we emphasized powerful narrative storytelling that brought our institutional strategic priorities to life, while implementing a new “right-size” strategy to tailor our storytelling for print and online readers.
What was the most impactful part of your entry?
This year, we honed our focus on a few priority narratives for our organization as a whole, aligned to the Penn Medicine strategic plan. This focus suffused all of the work we did across the Department of Communications, but looking back on our magazine storytelling in 2023-2024, emphasizing our strategic priorities meant we able tell a lot of important stories that connected the dots on work happening across different parts of our organization. In the past, a feature story might have highlighted the achievements of one or two departments in relative isolation. But in looking at big, important topics like how discoveries are translated into FDA-approved treatments, we could talk about Penn Medicine’s strengths in aggregate, across different clinical and research areas from mRNA vaccines and therapies, to CAR T cell immunotherapy, to technologies that cause tumors to glow during surgery.
What challenge did you overcome?
We’ve learned how to turn the prism to take a very large, complex story, and tell it in a few component parts. For example, a 12-page feature about advances in immunotherapies became a five-part online collection of stories including a patient story, a Q&A, an explainer article, and two traditional research articles. This is important to capture readers’ varied interest and shorter attention spans, especially online. This multi-part packaging of complex stories helps us meet different readers’ needs and helps us partner more effectively with our Marketing colleagues to find common ground with stories that meet the interests of their consumer marketing and branding needs.
Contact:
Christina Smith
Christina.Smith@Pennmedicine.upenn.edu