The Oregon Center for Nursing had a new initiative, and a challenge: Get the state’s nurses informed and excited about joining boards of directors. The OCN needed a writer who could create most of the content for a new website and give it an authentic voice and tone.

But I wasn’t a nurse. I spent the first two weeks interviewing nurses of all kinds, in person an on the phone, in order to learn what they were concerned about, how they spoke, and how a website that intended to teach them about board service could inspire them to do so. Then I got to work, writing articles, snipping out testimonials, and repurposing board-related content so it directly applied to nurses.

We launched the site just six weeks later, but by then I had created a full, solid set of board-related resources for a truly underappreciated profession. My greatest compliment on the project? Just before launch, one of my project supervisors told me, “You sound just like a nurse!”