Tote bags and checklists promote wellness at Texas Health Resources

The employees of Texas Health Resources (THR)—one of the largest faith-based, nonprofit health systems in the U.S.—are like employees of other hospital and clinic organizations: They spend long shifts on their feet in high-stress positions. To ensure they were aware of the healthy decisions they made, the organization introduced a communication campaign to cultivate interest and excitement around its Be Healthy wellness initiative.

The campaign implemented by THR and its partners—OptumHealth (a health services innovation company) and Fusion Hill (a marketing services company)—has won first place in the “Internal Communication Design” category of PR Daily’s Video & Visual Awards

The campaign would involve a wide variety of materials, from giveaways to emails, but they all had to share a common visual theme for employees to recognize the materials as part of the communication effort. The planning process focused on finding fun and clever ways to remind team members about the program, in some cases offering eyebrow-raising messages of inspiration and challenge that would be seen as fun and nonoffensive to employees of the faith-based organization.

Tactics included a tote bag bearing a “Be Healthy” apple-shaped word cloud and “You can do it” phrases (distributed at health fairs), checklists sent via email and distributed at events and team meetings, and a series of three “Real Time Countdown” emails.

The tote bags were so popular the team was asked to double the order, while the email campaign resulted in 25% open rates and a record-breaking completion of incentives by more than 80% of the team members and their spouses. The checklist was also a hit.

For creating a flexible but recognizable design that nicely accommodated the campaign theme, congratulations to Jody Rowland, Tedi Stoe, Dayna Lund and Luis Munguia.