Sanford Health’s PR Awards Strategy for 2026

Let’s be blunt: just pushing out press releases won’t get you noticed anymore, especially not in the crowded public relations field. If you want to win awards and earn real industry respect, you need to build award-winning PR stories. It’s about merging a great narrative with cold, hard proof of impact, a skill that’s particularly tough in a complex sector like healthcare. Sanford Health wins top PR awards year after year, so they’re a perfect case study. What’s their secret for turning dense medical news and local programs into stories that actually connect with judges and regular people?

Finding Stories That Matter

The PR campaigns that win awards are never about a single press conference or a one-off announcement. They’re built from a deep understanding of the organization’s real mission and the effect it has on actual people. For a hospital system like Sanford Health, that means getting past the clinical jargon to find the human story. So many organizations get stuck here, obsessed with their own internal milestones instead of what the outside world cares about. The question that cuts through the noise is always, “Who is better off because of this, and what’s their story?”

Look at how they handle a community health program. Instead of a dry announcement about its launch, they’ll find a specific rural town that had poor access to care and tell the story of how that one program changed the health outcomes for ten families living there. This means your PR team has to be proactive and embedded in the organization, sitting in on operations meetings, talking to nurses on the floor, and interviewing patients (with their permission, obviously) to dig up these narratives long before they’re obvious. The point is to find stories that are a direct reflection of your values. And with a HubSpot report noting that 85% of consumers demand brand transparency, this kind of value-driven storytelling is no longer optional for PR success.

A Good Story Isn’t Enough: How to Package It

Once you’ve got a powerful story, you have to package it so it gets noticed. An award-winning strategy in 2026 moves far beyond the classic press release, demanding a mix of digital content, multimedia, and very specific outreach. Sanford Health does this well, often creating entire media kits that are more than just text. Think high-res photos, short video clips of patients, infographics that simplify a complex medical topic, and maybe a dedicated, interactive webpage for a big initiative. The goal is providing content in formats journalists and audiences actually use and prefer.

Let’s say the story is about a new surgical technique. A basic press release might list the procedure’s details and success rate. An award-winning campaign, however, would package that story with a video of the patient’s entire journey from their diagnosis to their recovery, a 90-second animated explainer showing how the technique works, and an interview with the surgeon about its future potential. This layered approach makes the story impossible to ignore and gives journalists ready-made assets that dramatically increase the odds of them running the full story. According to Nielsen’s 2025 Media Consumption Report, people are watching 2.5 hours of short-form video daily. If your PR distribution plan ignores video, you’re already behind.

Prove It: Why Data Wins Awards

Here’s something most PR submissions miss, but every winning campaign has: clear, measurable outcomes. Award judges want to see tangible results, not just feel-good stories. In healthcare PR, that means showing specific jumps in patient satisfaction scores, a drop in readmission rates for a certain condition, or the exact number of people who attended a community health screening. If Sanford Health started a diabetes prevention program, their award entry wouldn’t just describe the classes. It would state that the program led to a 15% reduction in A1C levels for participants over 12 months and that it screened 5,000 people in underserved parts of North Dakota and South Dakota.

This kind of data-driven storytelling means you have to plan for it from the very beginning of a campaign. You need to set clear KPIs for your PR work, just like you would for marketing. We always tell clients to answer the “so what?” question. So you ran a program, what did it actually achieve? The answers, backed by real data, are what improve a good story into an award-winner. A narrative, no matter how emotional, feels weak and anecdotal without quantitative proof to back it up.

Getting Your Story Heard: Relationships & Reach

Even a perfectly packaged story can die in a journalist’s inbox if it doesn’t get to the right person. This is where solid media relations and smart influencer work make all the difference. Sanford Health operates across a huge area, so they know they have to tailor a pitch about rural healthcare access to a local community paper differently than they’d pitch a cancer research story to a national science reporter. It’s targeted work that comes from knowing a journalist’s specific beat and what their publication’s audience cares about.

Building these relationships is a long game of consistent effort. It means giving journalists exclusives, offering them expert sources for other stories they’re working on, and just being a fast, reliable resource when they’re on deadline. It also means engaging healthcare influencers, doctors with big social media followings, patient advocates, or health tech bloggers, who can give your story a different kind of credibility and reach niche audiences that traditional media can’t. A 2024 IAB report on influencer marketing trends showed that micro-influencers often get twice the engagement of bigger names because their connection with followers feels more authentic. This is how you get genuine third-party validation, which is gold to an awards committee.

The Final Step: Writing the Award Submission

This is where so many amazing campaigns fail. Winning PR awards is about how you present your story in the submission itself. These applications are arguments, not summaries. You’re building a case for why your campaign was the best. Sanford Health’s consistent wins show they take this part seriously, carefully detailing their objectives, strategy, execution, and (most importantly) results. Every single field on that application form is another chance to score points.

You have to clearly state the problem you were trying to solve, list your specific communication goals (like, “increase community awareness of pediatric cancer services by 20% within six months”), explain the creative approach you took, and then hit them with undeniable proof of your success. This proof must go beyond vanity metrics like media impressions and include things like qualitative feedback, shifts in public opinion, and hard numbers showing business or community impact. Look at the judging criteria for the big ones like the PRSA Silver Anvil or the Healthcare Marketing IMPACT Awards, they all drill down on strategy and measurement. A submission that methodically answers every criterion with specifics and data gives the judges everything they need to say yes. The clarity and strength of the story you tell in the submission document is often what separates a nominee from a winner.

To create award-winning PR stories in healthcare, you need more than a piece of good news. It takes a strategic eye for narratives, a commitment to data from day one, and a relentless focus on presentation. Any organization can get there if they recognize that every patient, every research project, and every community program is a potential story, as long as it’s found, packaged, and shared with a clear purpose. By focusing on human impact, measurable results, and smart outreach, any team can dramatically improve its chances of earning industry praise and truly connecting with its audience.