How we listen.
Our vision: To improve the future for our clients, our communities, and ourselves.
How do we do it? We communicate with the sole purpose of positively changing hearts and impacting minds. In this blog series, we’ll explain how listening, adapting to change, achieving results, and building relationships help make the impossible, possible.
Our creative process starts with stakeholder input sessions. Traditionally, we’ve conducted in-person input sessions at our clients’ choice of location—but we’ve become masters in conducting them via Zoom (thanks, COVID). Stakeholders can be anyone and everyone—business owners, boards of directors, investors, marketing and sales teams, employees, or a combination of folks. We focus on organically unearthing who you are, what you value, and what you hope to (and can) achieve. Fortunately, we know how to ask the questions that initiate these discussions so we can craft a communication plan that leads to results.
In 2017, Samaritan Healthcare in Moses Lake, Washington, asked for help defining their values. Over a two-week period, Aaron Hautala, creative director of Strateligent, guided Samaritan staff and Moses Lake community members through interactive, and at times emotional, input sessions to get to the heart of Samaritan Healthcare.
We listened to everyone from front-line receptionists to doctors, to elected officials and business leaders tell us what it means to be Samaritan and have Samaritan Healthcare in their community. And the values started to shine through: Listen. Love. Respect. Excel. Innovate.
“Our values are the heartbeat of everything we do—they are used in everything from job descriptions and onboarding materials to social media and patient interactions. And Strateligent not only helped us define those, but they did it by making us part of the process. They aren’t a typical agency that would just put us in a generalized healthcare box and say ‘This is what you are. This is what you believe. This is what you feel.’” —Gretchen Youngren, Samaritan Healthcare, executive director of development and communications.
By listening to what makes Samaritan, Samaritan, we helped articulate their values and then infused them into every piece of communication we created. For us, staying on-brand is more than just using the right colors and logos—it’s consistently and purposefully tithing from the organization’s mission and values.
And our input sessions didn’t stop within the walls of Samaritan Healthcare. The dialogue we started uncovered the passion for community development. And Moses Lake LEAD—a collaboration of community residents and business leaders with the goal of purposefully creating, planning, and building the Moses Lake of tomorrow—was born.
“We have a really special relationship with Strateligent. We consider them an extension of our team and part of the Samaritan family. And it really started with them listening and understanding who we are as an organization,” Youngren added. “We could not do what we do without them.”
Anyone can lead an input session. But at the end of the day, the end goal is uncovering commonalities, finding alignment, and plotting actionable steps that produce real organizational results. And that is where Strateligent excels.
Up next: How quickly adapting the McGregor Area Chamber of Commerce’s communication plan helped them do more with less.
