Filling a Vital Need for the N.C. Dental Society

The Challenge

For the North Carolina Dental Society, creating a new legislative advocacy group to speak for the health of the state’s dentists and their patients was not a choice. It was a mandate. They had to do something worth talking about, and they had to do it fast.

“The dental profession is facing regulatory assaults from the legislature and from well-meaning groups who think they know how to run dentistry,” said Dr. Alec Parker, NC Dental Society executive director. “We felt we had no choice but to respond.”

The Strategy

Working with the Society, we quickly discovered that a complete re-envisioning of their existing advocacy group, the Contact Dentist Program, was a necessity. The new group needed to be more action-oriented and completely re-branded.

We created a recruitment campaign to make dentists aware of coming threats to their profession. The NCDS also commissioned a new training program to educate members on the ins and outs of legislative advocacy, along with a new tracking program created to measure the progress of the group’s members.

Eckel & Vaughan came in and helped us position our issues in an entirely different way. Even more impressive, we now think of ourselves in a new way.
- Alec Parker Executive Director, N.C. Dental Society