Celebrating International Nurses’ Day with personalised video

There are nearly 700,000 registered nurses and midwives in the UK, working day in, day out to ensure high quality patient care throughout the health system. Each year, the Royal College of Nursing, the world’s largest nursing union and professional body, celebrates their contribution on International Nurses’ Day, which falls on 12th May (Florence Nightingale’s birthday). This year we helped create a campaign of celebration and appreciation where nurses could send each other a symbolic cuppa’ in the form of a personalised video message.

Solidarity, support and celebration

In recent years the Royal College of Nursing has produced a video on Nurses’ Day to celebrate the remarkable difference made by nurses around the world, each and every day. The video has previously been about highlighting the super-human abilities, professionalism, compassion and caring of nurses for a public audience but this year, with the profession facing difficult circumstances under austerity and increasing strain on the health system, the RCN wanted to give nurses the opportunity to celebrate and support each other.

They came up with the idea of a peer-to-peer campaign in which nurses, on or off the job, could join a symbolic, nationwide party to celebrate. The RCN would be sending out party packs to members and nurses would be encouraged to take short tea and cake breaks to spend time with their devoted colleagues.

Sharing a symbolic cuppa’

To help nurses celebrate their colleagues in style – but in a way that would also be quick and easy for time-pressed working members – the organisation wanted to create a tool which would allow them to make personalised video messages incorporating their name, an image and their favourite hot beverage.

We helped RCN develop the creative concept based around the idea of the hot drink as a symbol of support and care. A cup of tea can say “I’m on your side” or “I’m here to help”. When it came to creating the campaign creative, we knew that it was too important for stock imagery. So we enlisted the help of a bunch of Manifestonians to act as hand models for a full-day video shoot to create the needed assets – colourful and celebratory clips to help nurses brighten the day of their colleagues, and spread solidarity and support throughout the profession.

Making the Impossible possible

After generating the raw footage on the video shoot, we used Impossible software to create the personalised video engine, making sure it was a simple, painless and joyous task to create a message for a colleague. After coordinating with the in-house development team at RCN and providing some guidance on hosting the video, the campaign was ready to launch on Sunday 12th May – International Nurses’ Day 2019.

A staggering 1129 videos were generated and shared internally amongst nurses and their colleagues; that’a lot of symbolic cuppa’s!

We’re glad to have played our part in helping nurses celebrate the incredible difference they make, and to feel valued by the RCN, their colleagues, patients and the public.

Do you have a nurse you’d like to thank? Make them a personalised video here.