Introduction

With more than 20 years of collaborative work with community leaders, Healthy Places by Design consults with both on-the-ground and larger funding organizations to ensure that efforts to improve local health and wellbeing can truly be community-designed and community-led.

Its services range from strategic consulting and advising, to direct technical assistance and training, and it regularly convenes fellow health equity leaders to network and build skills together.

In early 2024, the Healthy Places by Design team was in the early stages of creating its next strategic plan. The team knew they wanted to prioritize communications, but didn’t have a strategy or a dedicated expert on staff to guide them. This high-performing, insightful and nimble team was determined to learn how to present their work in the best possible light and raise awareness among their key audiences.

Healthy Places by Design needed a communications team that felt like an extension of its staff, and Mixte answered the call. 

Our Objectives

Upon examining Healthy Places by Design’s previous communications plan and auditing its digital channels, we knew it would need a new plan to meet its goals and reflect all the progress it had made in the past year.

Our plan focused on three primary objectives, all of which centered around helping Healthy Places by Design build its capacity:

  • Build a clear messaging foundation to inform all future communications
  • Bolster social media and newsletter engagement through ad campaigns and human-centered stories
  • Begin a proactive approach to media relations and thought leadership

The Outcome

Here’s how we activated the plan and built the team’s communications capacity.

  • We helped Healthy Places by Design build a strong messaging foundation by:
    • Training the team to create audience personas and build lasting relationships with Mixte’s Momentum Model
    • Refreshing the organization’s elevator pitch, so that it could more clearly communicate its unique niche in its industry
    • Teaching the team to tell compelling, clear stories with the help of a values-based messaging framework 
  • We expanded Healthy Places by Design’s digital marketing know-how, giving the team the materials, skills and confidence to bolster social media and newsletter engagement in the future — and to expand their focus to web management as well. We helped the team build capacity around everyday digital marketing, including making social media videos, understanding Google analytics and making website updates via WordPress. 
  • We kick-started Healthy Places by Design’s proactive approach to thought leadership by writing a long-form article that illustrated one of its primary areas of expertise: social connection. As a bonus, the article showed the team what it could look like to put the values-based messaging framework we had created into action! 

We also supported Healthy Places by Design with content creation, strategic guidance and training in response to timely priorities that bubbled up during our time together, such as overhauling webpages to more effectively promote major programs and developing organic social media campaigns for significant recognition moments. In the end, the team appreciated our ability to remain strategic while meeting unanticipated moments of opportunity with flexibility.