Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association (AzHHA)
Campaign for Caring

Situation:  

To address critical nursing and health care professions shortages, Ceres developed a statewide campaign to educate Arizona’s high school students about the opportunities of nursing and health care careers and, ultimately, to recruit more people into health care professions. Ceres leadership developed the campaign plan and its advertising and marketing collateral, conducted research, and led all public relations efforts and initial campaign implementation. The successful campaign is still running today, managed by AzHHA internal staff.

Approach:

• Developed a research approach to discover what high school students found appealing about health care careers, and then created a campaign based on the research findings.
• Developed a grassroots research-based campaign in which nurses and health care professionals visited high schools to engage students in an interactive discussion about careers in health care.
• Created campaign materials and tagline: “I care. Will you?”
• Developed Campaign for Caring Web site to further expand the campaign’s awareness and reach.

Results:

• Raised interest and awareness among students, resulting in backlogs of students entering health care professions.
• Campaign messaging and the continued shortage prompted the State Legislature to allocate $20 million over five years to address the backlog in nursing education programs.