Nurse Your Senses,
A Campaign of Courage
Design Thinking
Brand & Campaign
A bold international nurse recruitment campaign that challenged the status quo and earned award-winning results.
Too many vacancies. Not enough nurses.
Vancouver Island's nurse training programs couldn't produce enough graduates to fill the region's annual vacancies. The new hires had to come from somewhere else.
That's a hard problem. There's a nursing shortage almost everywhere. Recruiting nurses out of one region just moves the shortage to another. On top of that BC health authorities don't poach from each other, even though every region is technically competing for the same shrinking pool of nurses.
This campaign didn't run in BC at all. It targeted nurses outside the province and outside Canada, in the US and UK, of any age or career stage. It asked them to leave everything behind for a new life on Vancouver Island.
Design creates culture. Culture shapes strategy.
The recruiting director had seen my team shift culture through a digital rebrand the year before and knew design could do more than decorate a job posting. In 2019 she came to me with a $340,000 international campaign opportunity and a hiring quota she couldn't hit through the usual channels. What could we do in-house?
Competing on scenery is competing on nothing
Every healthcare recruiting ad in BC looked the same: mountains, ocean, trees. So did every other industry's. Competing at a regional scale on scenery alone would lose to anyone with a bigger budget.
Most healthcare recruiting ads also looked like each other regardless of employer. There was an unspoken rule for what a nurse ad was supposed to look like. A shift was needed.
I went back to a recent nurse staff survey. What did nurses who already lived here love about it? Lifestyle, nature, lack of snow. All expected. One pattern emerged. Many were into extreme sports. Sailing. Surfing. Mountain biking. Rock climbing. Sports where you could genuinely get hurt didn't match the caring, careful image most people have of a nurse.
I used Empathy, one of Island Health's four brand values, as the starting question. What were we asking these nurses to do? Leave their home, friends, and families to start over in a different province or country. That's not a small ask.
I narrowed in on two other Island Health brand values that would empower the campaign. Courage, because leaving takes courage. Aspire, because they were choosing a different kind of life. While every health system claims Respect and Empathy in some form, courage and Aspire were unique.
So strange you can't look away
Knowing which values to lead with still left a gap. How might we turn values into a concept people actually stop to look at, remember, and act upon? I introduced the answer from outside healthcare. The concpet of the Strange Attractor. Some people think of it as a hook, but it's more than that. Screenwriter and producer Terry Rossio (Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Aladdin) uses it to explain why some movie titles and posters make people look twice.
Put "strange" (unique) and "attractor" (compelling) together and you get something unique that's also compelling enough to make people look twice and talk about it. The Strange Attractor, Terry Rossio
That became the filter for every idea that followed. Nurses doing extreme sports. Right after a shift. In scrubs. Wearing masks. It was unique enough that no other health system had it. Compelling enough that people would stop scrolling and ask a coworker if they'd seen it too. Yes, we'd show the amazing landscapes, but filtered through nurses in scrubs surfing, climbing, and sailing. Enjoying their new lifestyles.
If it makes the room uncomfortable, it's probably working
After my pitch I got immediate pushback. This was 2019, before the pandemic, when a mask in an ad looked as out of place as wearing a costume at the office. Nurses weren't supposed to wear scrubs in public. They weren't typically shown alone, without a patient, or doing anything that looked risky. Their culture was one of walking alongside, not standing out.
I listened. Then made the case back:
- This is what courage looks like. It takes courage to run an unconventional campaign. This moment required that exact response.
- No rules are broken. The nurses in uniform weren't out in public. They were on a controlled shoot, part of an ad campaign. This is what good creative looks like.
- We're asking for courage so the campaign has to show it. We're asking nurses to leave their homes and communities behind. That takes courage. We're not appealing to every nurse or administrator. We're appealing to the ones willing to make a big move. They need a reason bold enough to match the ask.
The tagline and series came out of that same conversation. Nurse your sense of adventure. Of wonder. Of excitement.
When internal reviewers signed off, the concern shifted to the possibility of negative comments once the ads ran. That's not the voice of courage, I said. And it's fine if people talk. The goal is earned attention, shared into the right circles, by the people we actually need to move here.
The creative team reached out to nurses who genuinely pursued extreme sports and wanted to particpate. They went on location at the oceanside, on forest biking trails, and on cliffs. When the first poster came back, I knew we this was going to work. A nurse crouched on the deck of a sailboat, pulling up the anchor chain, uniform under a life jacket, looking straight into the camera. I printed it out and taped it outside my office door. A senior clinical leader walked by, stopped, backed up, and stood there taking it in. THe strange attractor was already working
The poster I taped outside my office door. Click to view full size.
Curiosity. Adventure. Wonder. Discovery.
Four Strange Attractors. Real nurses doing what they love most around Vancouver Island.
Print magazines, transit shelters, digital, mobile, social, video, and recruitment tradeshows. Every channel, one team, no agency.
Campaign in motion
Video by Shawn Wagar
A phone call and a marketing award
We handed off strategy and creative and let the campaign dollars do what they do. I moved on to prepare for the second Code Hack. A few months later I got a call from the recruiting director with two pieces of good news. The campaign had exceeded its hiring target by 143%. And a nurse had reached out to say she and her husband, also a clinician, had moved to the Island seeing the ads. A metric and a story of real impact. I couldn't have asked for a better outcome
I'm proud of the creative team and grateful for the chance to make a real difference in nurse recruitment.
The campaign later won a MarCom Gold Award from the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals for strategic communication and marketing excellence.
What a Strange Attractor Can Do
The point was never the extreme sports. It was proving that a public health authority could take a real creative risk and have it pay off in hires, in culture, and in three years of reuse.
What Worked
- Two authentic values beat four generic ones. Every health system claims Respect and Empathy as values. Courage and Aspire were unique enough to build an entire campaign aorund.
- Borrow from outside the industry. The Strange Attractor came from film marketing, not healthcare. That's exactly why it didn't look like anything else in the recruiting landscape.
- Real employees make it spreadable. Real nurses, recognizable to their peers, meant the campaign could travel through the exact community it needed to reach.
- Meet the ask with the ask. Recruiting someone to leave their whole life behind required a campaign willing to take a real risk of its own.
What It Taught
- Discomfort can be the signal, not the objection. The pushback over masks, uniforms, and optics confirmed the concept was working before a single ad ran publicly.
- Influence beats a mandate. I wasn't in recruiting. The director trusted me because of previous work. That trust is what moved the projct forward.
- A named framework earns permission. Calling it the Strange Attractor gave a skeptical room language to say yes to something genuinely new.
- Good work outlives your involvement. Bit of a theme on this site. The team kept using the concept a few years after we had moved on to other adventures.