Interview Story - Took Initiative

When I started working at St. Anthony’s Medical Center, I was a marketing coordinator with responsibilities like writing and editing, laying out a publication, photography, coordinating with internal and external vendors and media coordinators. They were going through some hard financial times because of the recession in 2009 and the whole hospital was looking for ways to cut costs. So they were asking every department to cut costs by a certain percentage.

My supervisor held a meeting in order to come up with some cost-saving ideas. When I walked in, I never saw so many scared faces in my life because many of us didn’t have any idea where to cut. A few minutes into the meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had all these skills in photography and graphic design. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on outside agencies on design and photography, I could bring them in-house and lead these projects. I presented this idea at the meeting, and my coworkers were quite relieved by this potential solution.

After several meetings with my supervisor and some convincing of the VP of Marketing, I was able to move forward, starting with small projects. Since I was already shooting some photography for Media Relations and publications, this is where I started. I started shooting photography for events and student graduations. After a year of successful photography projects, I started to bring in small graphic design projects from an outside agency and after another year or so I was able to bring in all the graphic design and started a creative department, which is something St. Anthony’s never had. I designed and produced everything from ads, direct mailers, and event materials to big marketing campaigns (“Where did you go to school” campaign).

In the end, I ended up not only cutting costs by 25% and saved hours of time by doing projects in-house, but I learned a great deal about leadership and management. The marketing director shared how I was always flexible, ambitious and how I wasn’t afraid to take initiative.