Strategy + Branding

Changing Minds

Changing Minds is a campaign from the Health District of Northern Larimer County focused on raising awareness about substance use disorder, with a goal to disrupt the stigma about SUD through communication and coming together as a community.

Linden engaged with the Changing Minds team to refresh the campaign’s brand, create a robust marketing strategy and implementation plan – including updated targeted messaging for a variety of audiences – and to create new branded campaign assets for distributing the Changing Minds message across digital and traditional marketing platforms.

Brand Refresh

Marketing Strategy & Implementation

Campaign Assets

We began with an extensive discovery process to assess Changing Minds’ existing communication materials, including their social media platforms, print pieces, event posters and collateral, a cinema ad, their website and others.

What we learned about their tactics, their audiences and their goals helped us write a strategy that would reach community members living with substance use disorders, those in recovery, friends and family of SUD as well as the general public, with an overarching objective to disrupt stigma by sharing information through targeted messaging. A detailed plan included timelines, creative concepts, notes on communication platforms to utilize and a breakdown of how to pair audience groups with messaging styles, setting their team up for success with guidance for implementing the plan using their new creative assets.

Experiencing SUD

Blue, rounded letters spell LE PETIT COCHON on a white background.

Seven solid-colored circles of varying sizes and colors (blue, purple, green, black, teal, cyan, and light blue) overlap and intersect on a white background, creating a simple abstract design.

General Community

The word Karnchang is written in bold, green sans-serif font on a white background.

A group of overlapping, colorful circles of different sizes on a white background. The circles are blue, green, purple, yellow-green, black, and aqua, arranged in a playful and abstract composition.

Family + Friends

The word Funtastic is written in bold, light blue, rounded letters on a plain white background.

Animated image of colorful circles of various sizes overlapping and moving around a large light blue central circle. Other circles are pink, green, black, dark green, blue, and navy, all on a white background.

A Fresh Perspective

While updating the Changing Minds brand, we went for a fresh feeling – but not something entirely different. The original brand was a good foundation that we were able to build upon, including adding colors to the brand color palette, new fonts, additional options for imagery and guidance for how to use it, icons and brand marks to use for emphasizing key messaging, and designated color palettes for each of the Changing Minds audiences, which will help keep their communication efforts clear.

With the refreshed brand in place, we started to get creative.

During the initial discovery phase, we identified the Changing Minds audiences; in the marketing strategy we laid out key messaging that would be used to reach each audience. To bring these to life, we broke down each messaging concept, assigned it to the proper audience, applied the audience color palette, imagery and accompanying graphics, and delivered static posts as well as animated graphics to the Changing Minds team to use on their messaging channels.

We created a library of templates for each key concept and audience so their internal team will always have a fresh way to get their message across, while also maintaining the new brand style and brand elements.

A smiling woman making an OK hand gesture is above the text: Hope is a Tool for Change. Below, a purple box reads, When there is hope, there is a desire and a drive for something better; for change. Have hope. Give hope. appears at the bottom.

White and green text says, “Hope is a tool for change,” over a green sun shape on a blue background. Bottom text reads, “When there is hope, there is a desire and a drive for something better; for change.”.

Text graphic with the message: Hope is a Tool for Change. Below, a box says, When there is hope, there is a desire and a drive for something better; for change. At the bottom: Have hope. Give hope. on a teal background.

Spread the Word

There is a lot of compelling messaging about the science of substance use and substance use disorder, and how SUD literally changes the human brain. To help visualize this, and to emphasize the important message that SUD can be treated like any other disease, we created new animated videos for the Changing Minds campaign, based on assets they had previously used that had become outdated. The videos can be used in presentations, as digital ads or cinema ads, posted on YouTube or broken out into smaller pieces for additional platforms.

Disrupting the Stigma

Because the Changing Minds team also does a lot of outreach within the Northern Larimer County community, we created new printable resources on topics within the substance use disorder conversation. The team can bring these along to events, leave them at local businesses to display or distribute, or share the digital file with supporting partners through email.

These topics are important for everyone in the community, so we had these resources translated into Spanish expanding the reach of their message.

A graphic with the text Substance use disorder unravels the brain. Its science. in bold letters on a blue background with pastel squiggles. Additional text is partially visible at the bottom.

View More Work