A month ago, I landed in the nation’s capital carrying a lot more than my suitcases. I carried doubt and uncertainty about how I could fit in as a public servant.
The doubt started to settle the moment that I found real work to get my hands on. This summer, I am serving as a Marketing and Communications Intern at Mary’s Center, a federally qualified community health center that provides high-quality care to over 65,000 participants. Throughout this experience, I’ve worked closely with the team to assemble Mary’s Center National Health Week Campaign, one that put storytelling at the forefront of the message, and it’s given me a clearer answer to the question I arrived with.
Staring at a content calendar, my first instinct was to create as much as possible, a post for every program, a video for every service line, a graphic for every statistic we could pull. More felt more thorough. More felt like doing the job well. But as I sat down with the team to actually plan, I quickly learned that the real question wasn’t how much we could put out, but how much would actually land.
This shift changed how I viewed the entire campaign.
The first place I saw this was in the content itself. I had drafted a post that was entirely made of text, accurate but needed visuals. At first, the piece of feedback seemed like a small note, but in reality it pointed to something much bigger. A large wall of text asks a lot of someone scrolling past it in three seconds in comparison to a photo, image, or face someone recognizes from their neighborhood that actually gets them to stop scrolling and read the message. Good information that no one sees isn’t effective communication.
The second place was language. Mary’s Center serves a large Spanish-speaking population, and as I built out the campaign, translating the campaign isn’t a step I’ll get to after the “real” work is done; it is a part of writing the message in the first place. If a flyer or post only existed in English, it didn’t exist for a huge share of the people we were trying to reach. Building the translation into the planning process instead of adding it on in the end taught me that a message isn’t finished until the people it’s meant for can actually receive it.
The third was word choice. Even within a single language, the specific words on a caption can determine whether someone is invited in or talked past. Clinical language may sound more “professional,” but it can also create distance. Choosing a simpler, warmer language wasn’t a compromise on quality; it is the strategy. The goal was never to sound impressive, it is to be understood.
As the campaign has come together, I’ve watched all three of these decisions build across every post, story, graphic we’ve mapped out so far. Every piece has been built around one question: will this actually reach the person it is for?
That’s the biggest thing I have learned this summer about communications and advocacy: impact isn’t measured by how much you produce, it’s measured by what the audience on the other side can learn, understand, and act on. It’s tempting to equate volume with value, especially early on in a communications role. But a public interest organization like Mary’s Center doesn’t have the luxury of talking past its audience. If the message doesn’t land, the person who needs it doesn’t get it, and that has real consequences to their access to high-quality healthcare.
Being able to sink my teeth into the world of public interest communications has allowed me to experience the true meaning of grassroots. I arrived not knowing what it means to fit in as a public servant. I’m starting to think that the answer isn’t found in doing the most, it’s found in doing the work that actually reaches someone. That’s a small change in mindset, but it’s one I’ll carry with me long after this campaign goes live.