Washington Hospital

Washington Hospital
Investing in the health of the community

How advertising gave a hospital back its future.

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To avoid closure, Washington Hospital was ordered to carry out extensive seismic upgrades and expand its capacity to provide life-saving services.

To achieve that end, we were tasked with persuading the residents of Alameda County, California to approve a $190 million bond measure. Here's the rub: we discovered that 43% of the electorate used a competitor (Kaiser) and therefore may well have viewed the hospital as being unnecessary in their personal life. To overcome this and achieve the required 2/3 supermajority, we focused on a core truth: while routine care was managed by insurance, emergency life-saving services are a universal community need.

"Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten."

Bill Bernbach

The local community had built Washington Hospital once already—residents formed the district in 1948, voted to tax themselves to fund it, and opened its doors a decade later, in 1958, to a town of just 18,000 people.

That community has since grown past 300,000 and diversified significantly. So at a time when hospitals across the country were closing their doors because they had failed to hit their numbers, we turned the notion of what it meant to be a shareholder inside out.

In a world where consumers are bombarded by thousands of digital messages, we found that simplifying and stripping away marketing hyperbole builds immediate trust. And our campaign succeeded by featuring members of the community celebrating their ownership of Washington in full-page local newspaper ads, transportation hubs, and local TV news stations.

Performance: A 70% supermajority of the electorate put their faith in Washington Hospital by voting "yes" on Measure FF.
Fame: Washington Hospital has been named one of America’s 100 Best Hospitals by Healthgrades — a distinction it has now sustained for nearly a decade, most recently earning a 2026 Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award placing it in the top 10% of U.S. hospitals for safe, high-quality care.
Market Value: A new, 240,000-square-foot Advanced ER, Intensive Care, and Coronary Care Unit — the Morris Hyman Critical Care Pavilion — was completed in 2018.

Source: The Mercury News. Healthgrades.

"When these projects are completed, our community will be the proud owners of a comprehensive, advanced hospital that is structurally sound and ready to serve our residents for generations to come"

Nancy Farber, CEO