There’s a place 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles where the water is so clear you can see straight to the bottom from a boat. Where bison roam the hills. Where kids ride golf carts to school and the biggest traffic jam is a cruise ship unloading tourists in Avalon Harbor.
That place also has exactly one hospital. One emergency room. One pharmacy. One primary care clinic. Although its hospital can stabilize and care for many of its ER patients, those needing a higher level of care must be sent on a helicopter ride to the mainland. Cost? Expensive. To say the least.
Meet our newest client.
Echo-Factory has been named agency of record for Catalina Island Health. We’re leading brand strategy, digital marketing, and communications for CIH, including support for a philanthropic campaign to build a brand-new hospital before the current 1960s-era facility hits its seismic compliance deadline that would force it to shut down.
No pressure, right?
Paradise Has Problems, Too
Most people hear “Catalina Island” and think weekend getaway. Zip lines, Mai Tais, and that one Four Preps song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. What they don’t picture is the actual community that lives there year-round: roughly 4,000 people, the majority are not wealthy retirees, but families working in tourism and hospitality, many of them on Medi-Cal. The nearest alternative hospital isn’t another exit down the freeway. It’s a $90 roundtrip ferry ride that eats most of your day. Locals call it going “overtown.” And for too many residents, that’s still where they think they need to go for healthcare.
CIH isn’t just a hospital. It’s the island’s entire healthcare system rolled into one: a 24/7 ER, primary care, physical therapy, behavioral health, specialty visits, a retail pharmacy, a fitness center, and yes, a med spa. (Because even paradise needs Botox.) They’ve won the Press Ganey Guardian of Excellence Award three years running, putting them in the top 5% of healthcare providers in the country.
And yet, a local tour guide tells visitors every day that the hospital “pretty much just ships everybody over for every scrape.”
That’s the kind of perception problem a healthcare marketing agency like Echo-Factory lives to embrace. It’s exactly the kind of business challenge Echo-Factory knows it can address and is enormously proud to be selected to solve.
Three Audiences, One Island, Zero Margin for Error
As a healthcare brand strategy, this one requires three separate strategies running in parallel.
For the people who live on the island full-time: It’s about awareness and trust. CIH has been through a significant leadership transition over the past year, and the new team has used that opportunity to stabilize the organization financially, expand services, and dramatically improve care quality. Patient experience scores have climbed significantly. But word hasn’t caught up yet. As CEO Tim Kielpinski put it: “We might be doing a lot of things right. We’re just not letting anybody know.”
Our job is to close that gap through brand unification, bilingual service awareness campaigns, community health programming, and content that shows residents what CIH can actually do for them today. Not three years ago. Today.
For the visitors who drive the island’s economic engine: Over a million people visit Catalina every year. They arrive by ferry, by private yacht, by cruise ship or by helicopter. Some come for a day trip. Some anchor in the harbor for a week. Most of them have no idea what medical services are available if something goes wrong. Whether it’s a kid’s broken arm at summer camp, a cardiac event on a hiking trail, or a laceration that could ruin a vacation, CIH is there. Our work includes building visitor-facing awareness at key touchpoints so that the million-plus people who love this island know: if you need us to save your vacation or save your life, there’s a team on Catalina ready to do both.
For the donors who could support the future: CIH needs to build a new hospital. Not only is the current facility out of date, if it doesn’t meet California’s seismic readiness criteria by 2032, there won’t be a hospital.
The price tag will likely exceed $100 million, and CIH needs to raise tens of millions through a philanthropic campaign to make it happen. We’re developing campaign messaging and donor cultivation materials targeting people who already love the island, and who have the capacity to ensure it has world-class healthcare for the next century.
As one Foundation board member told us: “You can’t get it until it’s gotten you. You can’t get this until the island has called inside you and taken up residence.” That emotional connection to Catalina is the campaign’s most powerful asset. Our job is to put it to work.
Nothing About This Is Normal (The Way We Like It)
Hospital marketing for a Critical Access Hospital, the only one in Los Angeles County, on a remote island doesn’t look like hospital marketing for a regional health system on the mainland. There’s no competitive set. There’s no adjacent market to poach patients from. The target population swings from 4,000 to 10,000 on days when a cruise ship pulls into port. Staff housing is a real issue, because there’s literally nowhere else outside of Avalon (where the average home price is over $1.3M) for employees to live.
Our discovery process kicked off with interviews with clinicians, administrators, Foundation board members, donors, and community members. What we found wasn’t a simple brand awareness gap. It was layers: residents don’t know what services exist, the brand is fragmented across multiple websites and social channels, trust is still catching up to the reality of a stronger organization, and the donor community needs a completely different message than the resident community or the visitor community.
What also came through, loud and clear, is that this team genuinely cares. One nurse practitioner told us: “We’re never going to impress people with expensive medical technology. But if we can impress people by smiling when they walk in, greeting them, asking about their family, and remembering why they came in, that’s what we can do well.” Another manager described calling patients who can’t make it up the hill to the clinic and simply going to pick them up. In a golf cart.
That’s not a healthcare system going through the motions. That’s a team that treats 4,000 people like family.
“When we first visited the island and started meeting with the team, I think we all had the same reaction,” said Echo-Factory CEO Mike Schaffer. “This is some of the most rewarding work we do. If we do our jobs well, people on this island get better healthcare. If we don’t, they may defer care or wait too long, and have to be taken off the island by helicopter. The stakes don’t get much more real than that.”
Why a Healthcare Marketing Agency Cares About Bison and Sunsets
We’ll be honest. We didn’t take this engagement because it was easy. We took it because the challenges CIH faces are a concentrated, island-sized version of what every community hospital in America is dealing with right now. How do you rebuild trust after leadership transitions? How do you market services people don’t know exist? How do you recruit staff to a place that’s hard to get to, and even harder to afford? How do you run a capital campaign when your traditional donor base is tapped out?
These aren’t abstract questions. Since 2005, nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed across the United States. More than 400 others, over 20% of all rural hospitals, are currently at risk of closure. Critical Access Hospitals like CIH were designed to be the safety net for communities that have no Plan B. That safety net is fraying everywhere.
CIH compresses all of those national challenges into a community of 4,000 people surrounded by some of the most beautiful water on the West Coast.
If we can figure it out here, between the bison and the blue water and the one road that goes across the island, the lessons apply everywhere.
And the on-site client meetings aren’t bad, either.
