Maine’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program
Evolving the Brand for a Long-term Partner
Services
Team
A Public Health Campaign with a Behavior Change Strategy
Maine’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, in collaboration with the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, approached Ethos at the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their goal: to combat vaccination fatigue among direct-care staff in long-term care facilities. Additionally, they aimed to normalize COVID-19 vaccination as a routine immunization and provide educational materials on the benefits of vaccination against communicable diseases like influenza and COVID-19.
To gain insight into the target audience, Ethos began by conducting an internal immersion session with key stakeholders from MLTCOP, MHHS, and other long-term care representatives. Knowing it would help drive messaging, Ethos wanted to understand the audience and barriers to communication—and to vaccination.
What Ethos learned from that session was that long-term care workers are not driven by money or power or fame, but by compassion and the desire to care. Even more, long-term care workers were sorely lacking in recognition and weren’t fully onboard with being vaccinated. Indeed, the word ‘vaccination’ was a bit of a non-starter for some. With those insights, the Power of Care campaign was born.
The campaign focused on recognizing the impact long-term care workers have on their patients’ lives and speaking to the love and compassion they feel for their patients. To better reach the audience, copy referred to keeping up with “immunizations” instead of “vaccinations”.
Digital ads were used to send users to an information rich Power of Care landing page with supportive video interviews of direct care workers, while social media ads elaborated on the messaging. In addition, toolkits containing posters and brochures for internal use as well as talking points for staff conversations.
For you. For them. For everyone.
With the success of the initial phase, DHHS and MLTOP decided to broaden the scope to include residents and family members, in addition to staff. This brought new challenges—how to reach a long-term care resident audience that didn’t typically use digital or social media? Clearly, an entirely different approach was needed.
For this second phase, Ethos took the campaign directly to residents and created point-of-contact materials at facilities with a separate toolkit, containing posters where residents could sign up for in-house immunizations, tent cards, postcards, and even holiday cards that staff could share with family members.
Fast Facts
The Results?
With the close of the second phase, the client is more than happy and hopes to extend the campaign for another year—and Ethos is pretty psyched to have made a positive impact on a vulnerable population.
