In 2024-25, in my role as Communications Manager with the Child Health and Development Institute (CHDI), I spearheaded development of a special blog series taking a closer look at the impact of Connecticut’s behavioral health workforce shortage on children, families, providers, and schools.
The goal of the series was to increase and sustain attention on the policy recommendations included CHDI’s Strategic Plan to Strengthen the Behavioral Health Workforce for Children, Youth, and Families, a detailed report developed for the state of Connecticut and published in late 2023.
I had noticed that the organization regularly published incredible, deeply researched, high-impact (and quite time-consuming!) reports like this, but after releasing them with an initial round of promotion (eblast, a social media post or two), usually did not revisit them over time to get more mileage out of them. As part of a multi-year policy advocacy effort around workforce issues, a blog series seemed like a good tactic to experiment with. The idea was to highlight specific findings and recommendations from the strategic plan in a more easily digestible format, so that this important work wouldn’t get lost in such a large, dense report. We also needed to generate fresh content to continually raise awareness of the plan and its recommendations, especially during the 2024 state legislative session.
Our main audiences for the blog series and report were policymakers (including state legislators, local elected officials, state agency heads, and other key decision-makers) and behavioral health providers (including frontline clinicians as well as organizational leaders).
To produce the blog series, I worked closely with members of CHDI’s senior leadership team to identify blog topics and outline, draft, and edit the posts (most of which were published under the senior staff members’ bylines to further help position them as thought leaders in the field). We then promoted each post on social media and in our monthly newsletter. Topics included:
When it came time to evaluate whether all this time and effort had been worth it compared to our usual publication promotion strategy, I was relieved to discover that it had worked! Altogether, the series generated about 4,800 website visits and over 10,000 social media impressions over the course of more than a year. Social media posts sharing the blogs saw higher than usual engagement. Traffic to the related publication page (for the workforce strategic plan) was also significantly higher than for previous similar publications for which we’d used our usual promotion strategy.
Check out the full series on CHDI’s website:
