The making of Creating ChRIS: Getting the word out - Strategy and promotion

Justin Braun, creative strategist, and Gaby Berkman, public relations, discuss finding strategic ad placements and taking advantage of all internal and external channels for promotion. Gaby speaks to leading with the human side of the story and how it can relate to reporters and media outlets.  Justin talks about working with The Washington Post on advertising placement.

We've included a snapshot of the conversation, but you can also listen to the full conversation with our embedded player or download the MP3.

Washington Post ad placement. Photo credit: Karen Crowson

Gaby:  Typically when I am reaching out to members of the press to promote a new product or update, we will really focus on what’s new in the technology. But for the Boston Children’s Hospital story, we actually took the opposite approach. We led with the humanitarian side of itso how is open source technology being used by these hospitals and by these doctors to actually help people with their medical imaging?

A great example of this approach is that we actually had a 90-minute briefing with a reporter in the U.K. And 90 minutes is pretty significant because normally these media briefings are really only 20-25 minutes long. She was on the phone with our Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts Open Cloud crew, and they were able to dive into the story. But the reason why she was so engaged was that she actually had a personal connection with a family member with medical imaging and medical imaging scans. (Here is a link to the article.)

Washington Post ad placement. Photo credit: Karen Crowson

Justin:  The Washington Post brand studio was a native advertising placement we engaged with over the summer to really bolster thought leadership among a key audience for Red Hat, which is IT decision makers. Washington Post brand studio, and The Washington Post as a publication really over-indexes and has a great reach into that audience. It’s a highly important audience for us as we look to build awareness around our cloud offerings and innovation in the cloud.  

We worked on them on crafting this really interesting story, and we got to hit the overall project from a different lens. The concept was not letting your good ideas sit on the shelf for decades, the idea of using open source software to help bridge big gaps in healthcare IT, and how it can spark innovation in traditionally closed environments.

Creating ChRIS is a video series from Red Hat that shows what happens when passionate visionaries and open technologies come together. Born out of a tight partnership between Boston Children’s Hospital, the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), and Red Hat, the series follows a group of researchers as they develop the ChRIS Research Integration System—an open source, web-based medical imaging platform that greatly increases the speed at which medical professionals can analyze medical images such as MRIs.

This is the final installment of a five-part blog series that goes behind the scenes on several aspects of the project. (See part one, part two, part three, and part four.) Follow the Open Studio blog for more from the Open Studio team.