There’s a lively online debate taking place on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s web site about the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center suing the city of Pittsburgh in response to the mayor’s suit against the health care giant. The city’s filing challenges UPMC’s status as a nonprofit and resulting non-payment of payroll tax. 
Yet it’s only the most recent battle in a war that’s been taking place and playing out in the media for many years. At issue in this battle is whether the Pittsburgh region’s – and Pennsylvania’s – largest employer, a $10 billion health system with a billion-dollar surplus and $2 billion to $3 billion in reserves, according to the Post-Gazette, deserves tax-exempt status.
I’m not one for defending UPMC, though apparently many are. The system even got one of its most prominent surgeons, Dr. Freddie Fu, to defend the system in a letter that had the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and Jesus Christ, mankind’s salvation (or, in this case, Pittsburgh’s salvation).
I will grant this to UPMC: it has a legitimate beef with the city, because it was singled out as the lone nonprofit in the lawsuit. Yes, I understand the pile of money on which it sits. But for years, nonprofits of all sizes have been hearing the distant footsteps on the tax-exempt police, led by Sen. Chuck Grassley. And we at WordWrite have been saying for as many years that nonprofit health systems need to justify their tax-exempt status.
Now those footsteps are closer, and we’re seeing an amplified example of what is likely to happen when other communities, influential business leaders and local, state and federal legislators begin to question their hospital’s nonprofit status. How will hospitals justify their nonprofit status?
A billboard won’t do it. An ad campaign in the local paper won’t do it. A story about how a top heart surgeon provided emergency heart surgery for someone in the community, who, by the way, has no insurance but is now living a happy, healthy and active life, won’t do it, either. Neither will a page or two in an annual report.
Traditional health care brand marketing does not justify nonprofit status. And apparently neither does a one-year “contribution” of $622 million from UPMC to the community, at least in the eyes of many.
There is an ageless alternative for health care systems to demonstrate community benefit, justifying their tax exemption and enhancing their market position and distinction. That ageless concept is the story.
I’m talking about a hospital system’s “capital S story” – not the human-interest stories of doctors providing miraculous care (though those have a place) but the Story with broad, deep context that is robust, authentic and useful. Clearly, regularly and effectively communicating community benefit in an effort to preserve tax-exempt status should be a priority.
In our opinion, there are three critical characteristics of any organization’s Story:
- It must be authentic.
- It must be told by fluent storytellers.
- Its effectiveness must be regularly and frequently measured to ensure the audience or audiences are engaged with the Story.
As we look at UPMC as a case study, we see it has failed on all three points. We can point to the “word-class” commercials it paid world-class money to produce as inauthentic efforts to tell a story. We can look at its tone-deaf, combative and arrogant approach to answering its critics as the poorest approach to the role of storyteller. And we can clearly see that despite all the jobs it has created and its commitment to the Pittsburgh Promise, its story, as judged by thousands of people in its community, is ineffective.
Until there are sweeping changes in how it shares its story, UPMC is a lost public relations cause. If there’s one lesson other nonprofits can learn from this battle, it’s this: do a better job of telling your Story so that when your tax-exempt status is challenged, you can authentically say you truly are a charity. Read more about how you can do that.
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Jason Snyder is a senior vice president for WordWrite Communications.
