By Chris Carchidi, Marcom Manager
Each year, Medical Laboratory Professionals Week (Lab Week) celebrates the many individuals whose expertise is needed to perform precise laboratory testing. The American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics (ASHI) regularly participates in the Lab Week celebrations to recognize the many ASHI members who contribute to providing optimal patient care via complex lab testing methods.
ASHI achieved measurable engagement results from its yearly Lab Week campaigns, however, this growth plateaued in 2014. To reinvigorate the Lab Week campaign, the AH MarCom team worked in tandem with a task force of ASHI members and created an exciting new theme for 2015.
Development
The creative process began with a survey of the members of the ASHI taskforce. It was critical to determine what Lab Week meant to them and what the society wanted to express in the 2015 Lab Week theme. The idea of personalized care as a potential theme quickly rose to the forefront. Personalized care, in basic terms, recognizes that because each person is genetically unique, healthcare plans should be tailored to meet the individual needs of a patient. ASHI members routinely perform the testing involved in creating personalized care plans, and, thus, the theme of ASHI Labs was born — At the Forefront of Personalized Care.
Design
After the taskforce agreed on the thematic concept, the MarCom team began to work on how to express it visually. One of the main components of ASHI’s Lab Week campaign is the creation of a Lab Week poster to be distributed to all ASHI-accredited labs. In prior years, the posters, while well-designed, had a certain clinical-like quality that lacked excitement.
The team wanted the 2015 poster to strongly reflect the theme and feature a contemporary aesthetic. The ASHI taskforce instructed AH to include a human body on the poster in order to represent the patient. In the end, the creative team designed a piece that truly embodied the personalized treatment plan — an abstract human form made up of multiple unique parts.
Results
Much of ASHI’s Lab Week campaign revolves around social media, particularly Facebook.
This year’s theme drew record levels of engagement from ASHI members and Facebook followers, fa
r outpacing 2014 engagement levels. ASHI’s 2015 social media campaign generated:
