Understand your image
At Sisters of Charity Health System, the image enhancement
wasn’t an end unto itself. Karam and her executive staff set out
with the goal of leveraging the influence of 20 separate entities to
yield political clout within the realm of health care reform. The criteria for the branding campaign stemmed to meet that end.
“You need to have a real clear sense of what your goals are, not
just to have an image campaign to have an image campaign,”
Karam says. “Dollars are too short. Understand the goals front
end.”
Understanding those goals can be as simple as revisiting your
strategic plan. If you already have a concrete vision in place, examine whether or not your company’s current identity inhibits your
ability to get there. Karam engaged her management team in this
process to secure the necessary buy-in before moving forward.
Karam says before you take your first step in that forward direction, you must understand where you’re starting from. Your company cannot take on a new identity without comprehending what it is
at present.
At the health system, she engaged outside consultants during
this phase to conduct a thorough environmental assessment.
“We brought together representatives from each of our 20 entities to talk about who we were as a collective ministry,” Karam
says. “One of the key ways to do that is to begin telling stories
about the ministry, and that’s what the consultant helped us to do.
“They also did an audit of all of our communication strategies of
all of our entities, and they saw significant diversity in how we
communicated who we were.”
Throughout these initial steps, Karam was adamant about maintaining a constant channel of communication with as many crucial
stakeholders as possible.
“They were saying to me, ‘Well, how are we going to use that
information that I gave?’” she says. “You come back to them and
say, ‘This is how we used the information that you gave us.’ That
provides more buy-in.”
From this group of stakeholders, the consultants then formed a
steering committee, which included representatives from each
entity that would drive the rest of the branding campaign.
Conspicuously absent from this group was Karam.
“Even my internal staff was not present,” she says. “That’s critical. Give independence to the thought and to what the public is
thinking, whether it’s good or bad. We have no ability to control it.
It is what it is.”
Without her presence, the consultants were able to elicit unbiased feedback from those representatives, a necessity before
entering into the campaign’s next phase.