Service in Action: Penn Medicine’s Reimagined Digital Community Benefit Report
Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania
Service to community is deeply integrated into Penn Medicine’s medical education, clinical care, and biomedical research missions. For more than ten years, we communicated this ethos through an annual photo-driven print publication that documented the experiences of patients and clients served by our community programs and by volunteer efforts of physicians, nurses, staff, and students.
For the 2020 edition, we sought to reach new audiences beyond our mailing lists, expand our storytelling into multimedia formats, measure our impact, and be responsive to our audience’s interests, by completely relaunching the report in a digital format. The all-new Service in Action website offers visitors an array of storytelling and data that convey the impact of Penn Medicine’s service mission.
What was the most impactful part of your award-winning entry?
Breaking up one long report into a collection of individual stories made it possible to target dissemination of stories to interested audiences and expand our reach.
What is one thing you learned from this experience?
Videos were among the most popular stories on the site — speaking to the value of branching out beyond modes of communication that can be printed on a page.
What challenge did you overcome?
The COVID-19 pandemic delayed our early-March 2020 launch and shifted the public appetite for stories coming from a medical center. We reworked several stories and commissioned new ones that better reflect the times we live in.
Julie Wood, email@example.com