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Message Lab Media’s Colleen Cronin and our partners at Children’s Health recently earned the Article of the Year award from Swaay.Health for Micah’s Story: The biggest heart you’ve ever seen. 

It shares 13-year-old Micah’s journey through a heart transplant at Children’s Health, how his mom, Brittany – who also had a heart transplant – was there for him, and how this inspired them to start a nonprofit to help other teens going through transplants. 

Writing a story like this comes with big challenges. How do you interview someone about the scariest, most vulnerable experience of their life? How do you compress years of complex medical care into just a few hundred words, while still capturing the story’s emotional weight? And how do you weave in marketing messages without diluting the story’s power? 

We asked Colleen to take us behind the scenes about how she manages these challenges, and to share tips for taking patient stories from good to great. Here’s what she had to say. 

What were the story’s goals?

Colleen: Great question! Patient stories are so compelling that sometimes people think the stories tell themselves. But you should always start by articulating goals. This sets you up to capture the right details and craft something that helps your client accomplish their larger objectives.

Micah’s story is part of a project that uses patient stories to help Children’s Health showcase their amazing care and inspire families to choose them. Within that, we ask the Children’s Health team to fill out a creative brief with specific goals for each story. They wanted to highlight:  

• Resilience and hope for other families facing a transplant, because this can be such a lonely and scary experience. 

• The importance of mental health support for families facing serious health challenges, because this is critical but sometimes overlooked. 

• The importance of early detection and awareness of cardiac symptoms in kids. Micah’s mom got him to the cardiologist right away when he was having chest pains; we wanted other families to know this is really important.   

• The Heart Transplant Program at Children’s Health. They provide incredible care for kids with heart issues. We wanted to use that as an example that helps parents understand what sets Children’s Health apart, so they know where to turn when their kiddo needs medical help.  

How do you approach interviews with families that have gone through so much? 

Colleen: The interviews are my favorite part! They also make me nervous, even after all these years, because you ask families to talk about some of the hardest things they’ve ever gone through, and you have to create trust that they’ll feel comfortable doing that, and you’re meeting them for the first time and you only have 45 minutes to an hour. 

I try to be very casual without being unprofessional – to make it more of a friendly conversation than an interview with a capital “I”. I remind them that they don’t have to remember every detail or answer every question, that we can always go back and fill things in later, and that they’ll be able to review the story and make changes. 

A lot of times, these calls get pretty emotional. I’m asking about moments like when they were diagnosed with a rare disease or, in Micah’s case, when they learned he needed a heart transplant as just a teenager. Sometimes the families get teary and I do too; they’ve been on such a long, difficult journey and my heart breaks for them. 

In those moments, I always take time to honor their experience and talk about how hard it was. It also helps to zoom out and remember: Other families like theirs are going to read this, and it’s going to help guide them and give them hope during their own tough times. This is what motivates a lot of families to share their stories. 

With Micah, his mom Brittany first told her story of how she had a heart transplant and then was diagnosed with cancer. It had so many tentacles to it and it was just gripping. And then Micah told his story and it was equally gripping. So it was one of those incredibly memorable interviews where my brain was just exploding – thinking ‘this story is going to be so hard to write but so good because this family has lived such an unbelievable experience.’

Read more: Tips for conducting sensitive interviews

What was your writing and editing process?

Colleen: The writing is much harder than the interview, especially with complicated stories like this, where I talked to Micah and his mom about their separate heart transplant journeys, and also talked to Micah’s doctors about what made the transplant successful. On top of that, we had this related thread of their nonprofit, Transplant Teenz, and how it helps kids around the country. That’s a lot to weave together, and I always feel pressure to do justice to everything these families have been through.

One thing that helped was being really honest about how I wasn’t going to nail it on the first try and was going to need our team’s help. Before I started writing, I brought the story to our team meeting and workshopped different angles and approaches. Then I wrote a first draft that was intentionally way too long and sent it to my amazing editor, Megan Herndon, and told her I needed her perspective. These stories have to be efficient, but I also don’t want families to feel like this is a simplified, fast-forwarded version of everything they’ve gone through. Megan helped me cut through the fog and zero in on the pivotal information. 

Read more: Tips for giving writers effective feedback

What was the biggest challenge of writing this story?

Colleen: Figuring out what had to be left out. For example, we couldn’t include nearly as much detail about Transplant Teenz as I would’ve liked. Brittany shared a bunch of slides that talked about the organization and their online activities and support for kids who need transplants, and how they send gifts to those kids, and how this helps them stay positive and empowered through some really tough times. I could’ve easily written a whole story about that, but had to leave a lot of it out because it wasn’t essential to Micah having a successful transplant. 

What tips do you have for telling a good patient story (or any good story)? 

Colleen:

• Lead with emotion. Readers remember how a story made them feel more than they’ll remember things like technical surgery details or outcomes numbers.  

• Get specific. Asking for particular details, like how they celebrated their transplant anniversary, can add life to the story. (Micah and his mom went to the Cheesecake Factory). 

• You don’t always have to start at the beginning. Starting at a different point in the story can help create suspense and draw the reader in. 

• Show don’t tell. You’ve heard it a million times, but it’s true. Rather than telling the reader that Micah had an excellent outcome, show them how quickly he got back to playing tennis. 

• Keep the patient at the heart. These stories should feel authentic to their experience and be something families feel comfortable – and proud – to share. If you accomplish that, you can be confident that it will resonate with other families.

• Remember the goals. You want to be sure to go back to the creative brief and make sure you’ve hit on everything. Honestly, that can be kind of scary because there are definitely times when I think I’m finished and then I see there’s something else I need to touch on. But that reality check is important to making these stories successful. 

How do you weave in marketing language? 

Colleen: It’s delicate. If we do our job well, we’ll make an emotional connection with the reader and they’ll see that no one will care for them as well as Children’s Health or the other clients we work with. That feeling can get lost if you overrely on phrases like “our world-class experts are dedicated to compassionate care.” 

Obviously that’s important, but people are more likely to remember reading that a family’s doctor personally called them to see how they were doing, or gave their child a toy dragon at an appointment because they remembered the kiddo likes dragons. I always try to use those kinds of examples to put the marketing themes in action. 

Then, if we have specific marketing callouts, we’ll often put those in calls to action at the end of the story. That way, they still reinforce the sense of extraordinary care, without detracting from the narrative. 

What’s the client’s role in making patient stories effective? 

Colleen: It takes a team. With Children’s Health, we’re really lucky to work with Jamina Tribbett. 

Over the years, we’ve built a strong collaboration with Jamina, partly because we both value storytelling and are motivated by the same mission of making life better for kids and families. Since that’s our north star, it helps keep things in perspective and make decisions about which stories to do, and how to tell them in ways that resonate. 

One thing that makes a huge difference: Jamina really understands the importance of plain language, and trusts us to find a balance between what’s going to make their physicians happy and what’s going to resonate with a broad audience. She always advocates for that throughout the process. 

Even better, she’s a mom too and authentic and real, and upfront when things get overwhelming and stressful, like they do for all of us. That helps us work together to make her life easier, and to be sure we’re working super efficiently to get things done and off her plate. 

How do you tell if a story is successful? 

We look at concrete things like where the story was promoted and what kind of engagement it got. 

And then there’s something more nebulous. For me, these stories are a gift to the families – an encapsulation that explains a crisis in their life and celebrates that they got through it. A lot of families share them with friends and family, to show them what they’ve been through and how grateful they are to be on the other side. 

With Micah, his mom sent me a note saying that they’d had several stories written about them by various outlets, and that ours was her favorite. Whenever I hear that, I breathe a sign of relief and say “yay”, because knowing that the family feels heard and honored makes everything worth it. 

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At Message Lab Media, we love helping organizations with storytelling strategies and bringing them to life. Learn more about our work or contact us if you’ve got a story to tell.