Ant Hill Marketing

Ant Hill is thrilled for our pro-bono client, Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center who recently received a $12 million federal grant to fund construction of a new Cornelius Wellness Center. The center will replace the aging Cornelius clinic and will allow Virginia Garcia to provide greater healthcare access to uninsured community members is Washington and Yamhill counties.

We started working with Virginia Garcia about 3 years ago to articulate their brand in order to further their mission in the community. If you aren’t quite familiar with the organization, Virginia Garcia provides high-quality, integrated healthcare for thousands of Oregonians who don’t otherwise have access to care. And in this economy non- profit healthcare centers like Virginia Garcia are feeling the strains of an increased number of patients coupled with a reduction in federal and state funding.

This is a huge success for the organization and we send a big congrats to the Virginia Garcia and the VG Foundation team who have worked so hard to make this new facility a reality for thousands of low income families in Oregon.

Saturday was what I would call a Win-Win-Win day. From 8:00 a.m. to midnight, Siobhan and I were at the Art Institute of Portland for their annual web raising event. For those of you who don’t know what the web raising event is — it is basically a barn raising for websites.  Each year, AI schools around the country select a local non-profit organization, gathers a team of volunteer students, and develops a website in a day.

This was the first time an agency has been involved and it elevated the event to a new level, allowing students to see the brand we developed for the client and what they have to work with for the site development. Ant Hill guided AI students to build a website for our client Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Centers.

The day was long. I’m talking really long. But it was a really exciting day. The students worked so hard and developed an amazing site that will help Virginia Garcia communicate their core mission and brand. At midnight, the site was about 95 percent completed but wasn’t quite ready to go live, so we will be picking the development back up next Saturday to finish the site.

If you want to see a play-by-play of the event, just check out the twitter stream.

Here are a few photos from the day.

The schedule. (Crazy)

Morning food spread.

Teamwork in action.

Reviewing first set of designs.

Shiv chowing down on some Webraising food.

We look forward to seeing the final results next weekend!

-Erin

Giving back to the community…Ant Hill Marketing takes it seriously, as our support for probono client, Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center illustrates. We’re helping this great organization – which does so much for those with barriers to quality healthcare – develop and activate their brand.  Part of the activation process includes the development of a new website. In our effort to aid the up-and-coming talent enter Portland’s creative pool, we brought our  friends at Portland Art Institute (PAI) on board. The result is a Web Raising – developing a site in a day. Crazy? No way. We get to mentor PAI students and the start of Virginia Garcia’s new website. Under Ant Hill Marketing’s direction, students at PAI will join together to help Virginia Garcia push their new site live. Check out the new site on April 25^th: www.virginiagarcia.org.

I am very excited that I can now blog about our non-profit client, Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center. Kim (one of our partners) met the CEO, Gil Muñoz, through one of the medical employees. After talking with Gil, our team realized Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center would truly benefit from our brand development process.

What’s great about their organization is that they already have a really powerful mission and an amazing staff that are 100% behind it. The organization just needed help defining their distinction in the market and then visually expressing that distinction.

For those who don’t know, Virginia Garcia fills a critical healthcare need to those with barriers to access in Multnomah and Western Washington Counties. They opened with one clinic out of a two-car garage in 1975 and have now serve over 40,000 patients each year, with multiple clinic locations. And they are growing every day.

We have completed our brand development process with Virigina Garcia and are now in the midst of executing on the developed strategies. We are working on many exciting projects for them including identity development, collateral and a website. Can’t wait to share more soon!

-Erin