In order to maximize the return on UAB Nursing’s investment, we paired the recruiting materials of 2010 with the annual report of that same year. The annual report was in many ways a transitional piece, as it, for the first time sought to drive the reader to a website that delivered more of the report’s freight and feeling than the printed piece itself did. This migration to a digital format would become complete in 2011, but in 2010 these three pieces: the online report, the printed report, and the recruitment piece, carried almost equal weight.
Talk to a nurse. He or she will very likely be able to tell you exactly when in their lives they chose to become a nurse. For many of them, that desire reached all the way back to childhood. This was a key insight we could work with. We layered the rich emotional tapestry of nurses each telling his or her story of when they decided to enter nursing, with content relevant to the nurses UAB seeks to recruit. Essential takeaway for the recruited nurse? “They get me.”