Step 2: Brainstorming. The next step involved
sharing student sound-bites with the collaborative’s
State Advisory Board (SAB), a practice-education collaborative
of public health nursing leaders from
throughout the state. This board meets twice a year
to dialogue on statewide strategic issues affecting education
and practice. During one of these meetings,
members were divided into groups and asked to review
and expound on the students’ sound-bites, add
their own experiences, and place graphic representations
on paper. SAB members developed four proposals,
all incorporating the diversity of their nursing
roles as well as the diversity of the populations served.
Their artistic proposals were then electronically prepared
and shared with members of five regional consortia
throughout the state. Consortia members
melded the four proposals into two while further re-
fining the images and text. Recognizing their limited
abilities in marketing and graphic design, the collaborative
decided to seek professional expertise.
Step 3: Professional images. A partnership
with a local university art department was formed to
further explicate the collaborative’s marketing ideas.
Art students (marketing and graphic design majors)
in a ‘‘corporate standards and branding’’ course were
instructed to create campaign designs and artwork to
establish an overall ‘‘tone of voice’’ reflective of the
positions, roles, nature, and importance of public
health nursing. Students were informed that the media
materials must be professionally prepared and in a
manner that public health nursing would be easily
recognized, piquing the interest of both the nonnurse
and the nurse about the field of public health. The
materials also had to be ready for mass reproduction and distribution. Part of the assignment was to create
four posters and a professional logo.
To assist the students in their research, members
of the collaborative provided students with a brief history
of the visibility problems facing public health
nursing and the two presentations prepared by the
SAB and consortia. Two collaborative members, an
educator and an administrator, then conducted an
hour-long classroom interview with students. In the
interview, they further explained the scope of public
health nursing practice and shared proposed plans for
launching the selected campaign at the annual state
public health conference, with subsequent mailings to
local health departments and health care agencies for
their use in promoting public health nursing.