Annual Report
Creating One Piece of Content to Address Three Business Challenges
Eastpointe is a public behavioral health insurance provider serving a 10-county area in eastern North Carolina. It is exclusively dedicated to helping people who are enrolled in Medicaid or cannot otherwise afford healthcare.
The Challenge
In 2018, Eastpointe faced three business challenges. First, it needed to prevent further cuts to its state funding. The second challenge was preparing to navigate North Carolina’s pending shift to a fully privatized Medicaid system. Finally, they needed to adapt their operations to support the state’s goal of providing whole-person care for all of its Medicaid beneficiaries.
As Eastpointe’s strategic communications partner, their CEO approached Relate with a challenge: Create an annual report to serve as the centerpiece of Eastpointe’s communications on each of these business challenges.
The Target Audiences
Relate responded by first establishing the report’s priority audiences:
- Employees. Eastpointe wanted employees to understand that the success it enjoyed—and its ability to overcome its challenges—was based on their performance.
- Policymakers. State legislators and regulators would determine Eastpointe’s funding levels as well as the rules governing Medicaid privatization.
- Prospective business partners. Medicaid privatization would create opportunities to expand member services through partnerships with private insurers.
The Strategy
With the priority audiences established, Relate developed a two-part communications strategy:
- First, we established a theme for the report that communicated Eastpointe’s unique value proposition: Its community focus. This positioning:
- Reminded employees why they came to work each day and reinforced the organization’s “beneficiaries first” ethos.
- Helped underscore Eastpointe’s investments of both financial and human resources in its communities. Policymakers could see that these investments benefited everyone and that they were helping solve larger problems, including the opioid crisis.
- Provided potential business partners with a clear understanding of the immediate—and impossible to replicate—value Eastpointe would bring to any joint venture.
- Without the budget to create an annual report website, the second part of our strategy focused on addressing the reality that most annual report documents are never read. We needed to ensure a reader could quickly understand our main points with just a cursory glance. We accomplished this goal by:
- Designing each main section of content around a piece (or several pieces) of visual content.
- Ensuring our main messages were summarized through a combination of the report’s first main content piece—a Welcome Letter from executive leadership—and the header for each of the report’s main sections.
The Execution
With our communications strategy set, Relate managed every aspect of the document’s development, including:
- Creating a production schedule
- Engaging with staff from across the organization to collect content
- Writing articles
- Organizing all of the content to tell Eastpointe’s story most effectively
- Editing and proofing the content
- Identifying and managing partner companies to design and print the report
The Results
Relate created both print and digital versions of Eastpointe’s annual report. The report was delivered on-time and on-budget. Executive leadership used the report to guide conversations with all of its priority audiences, address its business challenges, and position the organization for growth.
Our success in 2018 led to a repeat engagement in 2019. The digital versions of both reports are provided here.