The brief was to help UHB recruit more nurses, and create an advertising campaign that not only sold the many benefits that come with working at the Trust, but also convey Bristol in all its glory as a fantastic city to live and work.
With great USP’s such as their maternity hospital being ranked top in the country; Bristol being voted in the top 10 happiest cities to work in the UK – Guardian; and the 2015 Green Capital status being awarded to the city, we had plenty to work with!
We were tasked to recruit experienced nurses who are passionate about their career and caring for patients, want to live in a vibrant city, and work in a Centre of Excellence. After talking to nurses at the Trust we established that they all loved working in the centre of Bristol and thought the Trust provided a supportive working environment and plenty of opportunity for career development. We developed a strong campaign line that we felt would capture the essence of Bristol being a great City to live and appeal to nurses who love nursing and enjoy a good work-life balance…. “Love Life, Love Bristol.”
After all, a campaign could be beautifully executed and visually stunning but if it isn’t going to engage its target audience, it isn’t successful. The goal was to create something visually striking and well executed which also captures the attention of the target audience.
There were various routes we felt could potentially work, and after generating different ideas, creating mock-ups and lots of discussions, we felt an illustrative approach would most effectively convey the feel of the campaign and appeal to the target audience. In order to capture the illustrative approach we envisaged, we commissioned the talented Bristol based illustrator, Phil West. We wanted to choose an illustrator who was well known in the city, and Phil (designer of the ‘Bristol Pound’ note) was perfect.
The illustrations needed to be versatile enough to work across all mediums i.e the recruitment website, film, online advertising as well as print. Creating a new campaign brand with the illustrations and strap-line would also help to build a more long-term strategy around employer branding, engagement and internal communications for the Trust.
One element of the campaign was creating a series of short films looking at the day-to-day lives of nurses at the Trust to give potential job applicants an insight into the environment they’d be going into – this would sit on the www.nursingbristol.co.uk website. We worked with video production company Rockadove, who we’ve worked with before on similar film projects, so we knew it would be a productive partnering.
We spent a couple of days at the hospital chatting to the three nurses who would become the main subjects of the films, getting a feel for their roles and capturing the passion they all had for their work. It was hugely insightful, and helped when storyboarding for an unscripted interview style film, making sure we portrayed the best and most truthful reflection of the hospital in our films.
We filmed the nurses going about their general tasks, both inside and outside of the hospital and recorded an audio interview with the nurses with open questions to capture a natural and honest story of what it is like to work at the hospital and what brings people to work in Bristol. The campaign animated illustrations worked really well throughout the videos to break up the film and introduce a pause to the flow of the interview.
Now the films, website and advertising are live it’s a great feeling seeing a campaign that not only looks effective across all varieties of media, but that will help deliver the best care for patients and the community (good stuff) and above all, is successful for the client. A good job done and a huge thank you to all the staff involved, we really enjoyed working on this campaign.
