MCHC

A Media and Creative Engine for a Rural Health System

Mendocino Community Health Centers does excellent work across two rural Northern California counties: primary care, behavioral health, substance use treatment, women's health, and more. Echo-Factory built the media and creative engine to make sure the community knew it.

Healthcare Marketing

The Challenge

The care was never the question. Community perceptions, and lack of awareness were.

As a federally qualified health center, MCHC was boxed in by assumptions on both sides. People with private insurance didn’t know MCHC took it, or that the care was as good as anywhere in the region. People on Medicaid or without coverage didn’t always know they could walk in at all. And newer service lines were doing great work that the community had never heard organized as a clear offer.

On top of that, MCHC faced its hardest operational problem: recruiting clinical staff into a rural market that a national staffing vendor wouldn’t even take on.

Our Solution

We built an always-on media and creative engine, and every campaign started with one sharp insight.

For behavioral health: people look for support in all the wrong places (a friend, a hairdresser, the dog) because they don’t know therapy is open to anyone. For substance use: addiction is a disease, so the work treats it like one. For the new Same Day Clinic: get seen today instead of waiting weeks. Twenty-four integrated campaigns ran across the year, each built to meet a real barrier head-on.

Every one was developed in English and Spanish from the first concept, reviewed for cultural nuance rather than literal translation, with Spanish-language radio and consistent Spanish print and digital ads. In this region, that reach is the difference between a campaign people see and a campaign people trust.

We pointed the same approach at recruitment, running thirteen campaigns built to catch the eye of candidates scrolling a sea of identical job postings.

The Results

In 8 months, the always-on awareness campaign delivered:

Recruitment moved with it:

4.5 million paid social impressions
2.4 million unique users reached across Mendocino and Lake counties
27,000 clicks to MCHC’s digital properties
30,000 social engagements

Monthly reach grew from an average of 19,000 unique users to roughly 80,000 year over year. In a two-county region of about 150,000 people, MCHC now shows up in front of a real share of its service area every month.

3x more qualified clicks to job postings, year over year
2x more engagement on recruitment content
2 million impressions and 615,000 users reached

Two of those recruitment ads, both built for a hard-to-fill optometrist role, won at the 43rd Annual Healthcare Advertising Awards: a Silver for the eye chart and a Bronze for the side-effects parody. The trophies were a bonus. The point is that MCHC has now hired an optometrist and is opening an optometry clinic later this year.

The best-kept secret in the region is getting a lot easier to find.