Condensing a Year’s Worth of Accomplishments: Make it Broadcast News

How do you condense a year’s worth of organizational accomplishments into a 30-minute presentation? Turn it into broadcast news.

Here’s the story.

Recently we were asked by a healthcare client to assist with the system’s annual quality and safety planning retreat. The retreat brought together physician leaders, clinical leaders, and administrators from across the organization.  Every year that the retreat has been held, the group has gotten bigger and bigger with newer participants not always as familiar with the quality and safety program as long-time participants.

Somehow, though, the retreat has to fulfill two broad purposes for both newer and long-term participants. It has to take a look back and review the many quality and safety accomplishments across the system of the past year.  And it has to look ahead so that participants can determine priorities together for the coming year.

The challenge in planning the retreat was to find a way to give sufficient time to presentations to fulfill both purposes. That had not been easy in prior years.  Prior retreats had spent much more time on familiarizing the group with the past year’s accomplishments by having each vice president speak about his or her individual part of the quality and safety initiative.  As a result, there was insufficient time to focus on plans for the coming year.

Our client needed a different, quicker way of getting everyone up to speed on the overall quality and safety framework and on the accomplishments of the prior year.

Our client’s initial suggestion was to treat reports of past accomplishments like a press release. We built on that suggestion and recommended that the reports be presented like broadcast news.  The reports would be written like broadcast news copy.  And the presentation would take the form of a 30-minute news program.

The client liked the concept and followed through on it by producing the news broadcast on videotape, using as her co-anchors two former broadcasters well known in the market. Their reporting was supported by “field reports” that featured executive experts. The final presentation was made on monitors in the auditorium so that the day’s meeting began with televised morning news.  And the rest of the day was free to do forward planning.

Using the morning news format enabled us to tell the story of the year’s quality and safety accomplishments in a condensed, yet complete, way. And the client had a product – the videotaped newscast – that could be reused with other employee audiences and posted on the system’s YouTube channel.

Take a look