Marketing & Communications in Digital Health ~ Independent Author and Content Creator
I specialise in longer written communications: press releases, white papers, thought leadership content, blogs, and so on. I’ve been with digital healthcare company Brain in Hand for five years, beginning as an assistant to the sales team and working up to marketing & communications manager – I achieved this mainly by taking on as much content creation as I could, demonstrating that this is what I know how to do. I had no idea how to edit videos, but I took that on too.
Outside my day job, I’m an independently published author and work as a copy editor and proofreader for a few small publishers.
Best Practice Guide to Digital Innovation
My biggest project to date with Brain in Hand, a health tech company who provide a hybrid of digital and human support to people with a range of needs, was creating an extensive best practice document on our approach to implementing technological innovations in health and social care services (local authorities, NHS trusts, and so on).
We ran a webinar with four of our local authority clients; I then took the content from the session and worked with internal stakeholders to develop a story and copy for the document. Once finalised, I worked with an external design agency to get it laid out and looking good.
Written for an audience of budget holders, commissioners, directors, and managers, it’s a thorough piece that establishes Brain in Hand as thought leaders in the area while delivering genuine value to help the reader integrate digital support.
Download the full document here.
Press releases, blogs, web pages
Here’s a recent example of a press release, written with the involvement of company directors and the CEO to announce Brain in Hand’s third win of a Small Business Research Initiative award.
To support the release of the best practice guide, I wrote a blog post for the County Councils Network, one of the biggest and most influential organisations for county-level local authorities. It’s attributed to one of the company’s directors, but the author was in fact yours truly.
I’ve also written some more personal blog posts for our business development staff, such as this one about how fast technology progresses. I was happy with the less formal tone of this one, and the member of staff who provided the story was pleased with how the piece came out – I worked with him to make sure he felt comfortable that the piece said things in the way he would say things, not in my own voice.
While I don’t have full creative control over the Brain in Hand public-facing website, I have assisted with developing content for some of its pages, working with the marketing director, an external creative agency, and several internal stakeholders.
We recently revisited our home page and health & social care page to make them more engaging and easy to use (I think you’ll see the difference if you compare them to the other pages).
Brain in Hand Video Content
I taught myself to use video editing software – first Lightworks, then Premiere Pro CC – so I could serve an unmet need within the business. I’ve created several user case studies and a few things of a slightly different nature.
Here we see the story of Brain in Hand in Hereward College, where it was used to help students transition to employment. I will disclaim that I didn’t pick the music and I’m much better at graphics and audio cleaning these days, but we haven’t filmed anywhere in person for a while!
This video was produced entirely with internal resources; I worked with our staff who knew the client well to develop the story and the questions they would ask, then briefed them on the technical side of filming and the kind of B-roll that would be useful. From that, we created this.
This is a much more recent video I made entirely myself; I developed the story, sourced stock footage and recordings of our system, recorded audio, and edited the whole thing together.
More Videos
For something a bit more fun, here are two videos I made for independent publisher Skullgate Media. The first is a trailer for a book release and advertises a Kickstarter campaign; the second is an animated comic book reading.
The editor-in-chief wrote the script for this one and briefed me on what he wanted; I sourced a few volunteers for voice acting and a bit of stock art, then cobbled it together for him.
This was a bit trickier; I sourced the original comic page art files from the artist (one with text overlays and one without), got some volunteer voice actors and arranged their lines in Audition, then had to work out how to make it all display a bit more dynamically in Premiere.
I’d love the chance to create more content, especially long-form written pieces. I’ve come up with my own ideas and delivered on concepts briefed to me by directors – and these have ranged from flyers for drop-in user engagement sessions to thought leadership pieces for directors of services, so I know I can create something for an audience of professionals, end users, or anything in between.
Chris Durston 