CLIO Healthcare recognizes 75th anniversary campaign

It’s no small feat to win a CLIO award—one of the most sought-after in the communications field, given to honor excellence in creativity and design. Hundreds of entries are submitted in each category and are judged by the industry’s most accomplished and celebrated leaders.

This year, the CLIOs created a new award category, specific to health care. And the first-ever CLIO Healthcare Award went to the Academy’s year-long campaign “75 Years of Orthopaedic History.”

The campaign—which celebrated the advances and innovations of 75 years of orthopaedic medicine—gave Academy members and staff as well as medical professionals and the orthopaedic industry a chance to reflect upon the specialty and celebrate advances in orthopaedic care.

“The Academy’s 75th anniversary provided the AAOS and our members a phenomenal opportunity to commemorate the history of orthopaedics, which as a specialty has improved the mobility and quality of life of millions of people,” said AAOS CEO Karen L. Hackett, FACHE, CAE. Accompanied by Sandra R. Gordon, AAOS director of public relations, Ms. Hackett accepted the award on behalf of the Academy last month.

The campaign, which won in the Healthcare Award category, Non-Profit/Patient Advocacy Campaign subcategory, included the following Academy-wide communications initiatives celebrating 75 years of orthopaedic achievement:

• Moving Stories: a book and traveling exhibition that chronicled the lives of patients and surgeons and the history of orthopaedics
• Moving Pictures: the film companion to the Moving Stories programs
• www.aaos75.org: a comprehensive and interactive Web site
• Historical interviews, recorded and shown online
• eMotion Pictures: an art exhibition and book featuring the artwork of orthopaedic surgeons and their patients
• A digital timeline found on the Web site
• Getting it Straight: a reference book documenting the specialty and the histories of the AAOS and other orthopaedic societies
• A media relations campaign
• Academy Chronicles: a permanent exhibition with more than 500 pieces of orthopaedic history, on display at the AAOS headquarters in Rosemont, Ill.

“When you have emotional stories of people healing and of compassionate surgeons, when you have both written and oral history from which to pull, you have all the ingredients for a campaign that honors the profession and the orthopaedic surgeons themselves,” said Ms. Gordon. “For us it was an opportunity of a lifetime to create amazing programs and tell some very compelling stories.”