Lorraine Communications, Inc.

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The evolution of Lorraine Communications, Inc.

One might say that Lorraine Communications began with the founder’s first newspaper byline at the age of eight in her Jackson County Floridian weekly newspaper. She was a regular contributor of the news from her Brownie meetings, which grew into weekly reporting of her Girl Scout Troop for the Gadsden County Times when her family moved across the Chipola River to Quincy, Fl. Her journalistic aspirations were further inspired by the family relocation to Mobile, Al, where she quickly joined the Murphy High School newspaper staff and became its co-editor the year it received the best in the state award by the Alabama High School Press Association. She selected the University of Georgia Grady School of Journalism for her college career, immediately joining the Red and Black and rising to assistant news editor her freshman year. After a financial setback left her to pursue basic college curriculum at home at the University of South Alabama, she returned to Georgia not as a journalism major, but with an emphasis in public relations and a minor through the business school in marketing and management. The combination of strategy, writing skills and that journalistic nose prepared her well for employers and clients alike. She often describes her abilities as creatively bipolar as they swing from detailed analysis to high functioning creativity. The integration of skills serves her clients well.

Lorraine’s first big break professionally was an offer from the University of Georgia Institute of Ecology. The scientists were frustrated that environmentalists who were without the ecologists’ academic backgrounds were getting the credit. At the same time, ecologists were interview shy due to inaccurate stories and “cutesy” approaches from reporters who could not begin to fathom what the highly technical scientists were really doing. Although science was the bane of Lorraine’s academic studies, she figured that if the scientists could make her understand the significance of what they were doing, she could make the lay public appreciate it. The result was stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science Digest, National Geographic, BBC as well as broadcast by the Associated Press and United Press International. Together they broke the stories of how the salt marsh feeds the ocean, how the Amazon Forest survival is due to its root mat, how fire maintains the Okefenokee Swamp--and even frog eating pitcher plants. In addition to translating these highly technical subjects into stories appreciated by the lay public, she was also responsible for maintaining communication among scientists from 16 different disciplines, who all talked a different language. The decade at the Institute of Ecology was a study in explaining complicated subjects and knowing your audience.

Lorraine was asked to bring her skills of communicating complicated subjects among diverse audiences to St. Mary’s Hospital in 1983. She was granted the time to delve intensively into the hospital’s services and target audiences identified by each of the hospital departments and services and built a foundation for a marketing plan to effectively communicate with each major internal and external audience. She fine tuned educating gatekeepers in order to spread the message as well as potential users of hospital services throughout thirteen counties of Northeast Georgia. Because the period of Lorraine’s tenure at St. Mary’s Hospital was a period of huge technical advancements in the health care industry, she was able to draw on her strengths of communicating complicated subjects in helping potential patients appreciate how these new advancements could benefit them. As St. Mary’s grew its continuum of care rapidly during this period, Lorraine led communication and marketing strategy in personal and industrial wellness programs, pediatric intensive care, pediatric rehab, including hippotherapy, subacute care, assisted living, nursing home, home health care and hospice. This emphasis on ancillary services made Lorraine an expert in post discharge services as well as communication of acute care. The nose for news, honed since the first by-line served the hospital well in crisis communications and telling the hospital story.

By 2001 Lorraine Communications, Inc was founded to combine the strengths of communicating complicated subjects and complicated situations. The agency has found its calling among audiences frequently ignored by traditional agencies: effectively reaching and communicating to the under-served metro and rural populations, minority communities, even the homeless. The expertise gained at communicating St. Mary’s services to its surrounding rural communities has helped a many an organization expand into surrounding areas after they had hit a brick wall when they thought their efforts would be a piece of cake. The agency has built a reputation for using non-traditional means of communicating to hard to reach gatekeepers and audiences with significant results. The agency has evolved its strategic communications expertise into affordable Premier Positioning Plans to re-boot small companies that had given up or were frustrated that nothing they did was working. Through extensive marketing and community assessments, she has turned around companies which had based their strategies on misconstrued paradigms and enhanced overlooked internal communications. The agency has provided the platform for effective social media communication and enhanced search engine optimization and effective branding through all media.

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