A new election cycle is upon us, which means America is once again scrolling its way through headlines, policy debates, and an endless stream of TikToks featuring people explaining complex health care issues from the front seat of their car.

If you’re an organization in or around health care, you know what’s coming: a giant, chaotic, high-velocity conversation where everyone has something to say, and very few people have the patience to read anything longer than a tweet.

So how do you show up in this moment without getting lost, ignored, or mistaken for a PDF from 2009?

Three key rules: Know your audience. Lead with affordability. Embrace digital-first.

1. Know your audience. Now is a perfect time to clean house on your old messaging guides. Because when it comes to health care, voters’ views on key issues are no longer neatly divided into partisan voter blocs. To help organizations understand, reach and engage with voters in more direct and impactful ways, Reservoir launched a new end-to-end platform, PRISM, that identified 16 specific audience segments across the most engaged voters in both parties. PRISM allows us to understand the unique POV and issues that resonate within each of these core audiences and the messages and narratives that they care about. Think of PRISM as noise-canceling headphones that filter out the static so organizations can hear what their audiences respond to most.

2. Lean in on affordability. One of the biggest takeaways from the elections earlier this month: affordability is front and center for voters. Recent polling from KFF shows that voters in New Jersey and Virginia who identified health care as the most important issue resonated with messages and positions that made cost and access front and center. When organizations talk about affordability, it’s important to get brass-tack on the reality facing consumers and specific about ways to solve for cost challenges. That means refining affordability messaging and focusing on the solutions that really matter – whether you are talking to families in the Mississippi or small business owners in Montana.

3. Embrace a digital-first strategy. If your communication strategy still relies on PDFs, I have some news. Issue briefs had a great run, truly. But in 2025, health care thought leadership is happening on platforms originally designed for dance routines and cat videos.

Just look at the latest stats from Pew:

• “Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news: 38% of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on Facebook, and 35% say the same about YouTube.”
• “20% of U.S. adults now regularly get their news on TikTok.”
• “Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say they get news from Instagram, TikTok and Reddit. Roughly equal shares of each party, though, say they regularly get news from YouTube.”

That means truly embracing storytelling and video content as the ways to reach key audiences. Short explainer videos, swipe-through story formats, mobile-friendly visuals, and human-centered storytelling break through, where issue briefs and reports simply don’t. Short, sweet and scrollable wins every time.

Health care communication during an election cycle isn’t for the faint of heart. But starting early and refining relentlessly means that your message can survive and thrive the election-year noise.