01
Discovery
Interrogated the drop-off: what happens on May 1st, and who feels it first.
Key decision
Reframed the brief from 'campaign' to 'platform'.
Lesson learned
The brief you're handed is rarely the problem you have.
National Awareness Campaign
National Awareness Campaign — SAAPM 365
Turning one of the nation's largest awareness moments from a thirty-day spike into a year-round movement — through platform thinking, modular partner toolkits, and a sustained content rhythm.
- Client
- RAINN
- Role
- Creative Director / Campaign Strategist
- Industry
- Nonprofit · Public Awareness · Advocacy
- Team
- Creative, digital, content + national and campus partners
- Timeline
- 2026 — 2027
- Deliverables
- Campaign platform, flexible identity, partner toolkits, editorial calendar, environmental design
- Technology
- Figma, Adobe CC, social platforms, email, analytics dashboards
Scroll
01 — Project Overview
The executive summary
Challenge
Attention surged every April and collapsed in May — annual rebuilds burned budget, erased recognition equity, and left eleven quiet months of unleveraged partnerships.
Role
I set the campaign vision, built the platform architecture, and coordinated the cross-functional machine required to sustain a national campaign continuously.
Deliverables
A flexible campaign identity, twelve-month editorial calendar, modular partner toolkits, mobile hub, environmental design, and quarterly executive reporting.
Business Impact
Twelve months of activation instead of one, hundreds of partners self-serving on-brand, and Q1 production capacity returned to strategic work.
02 — The Challenge
The Challenge
Sustaining a campaign for twelve months is a fundamentally different design problem than peaking for thirty days.
Sexual Assault Awareness & Prevention Month concentrates the year's media coverage, partner activation, and donor attention into a single window. It is the organization's loudest moment — and its most temporary one.
Meanwhile the mission does not observe a calendar. Survivors reach out in November. Campuses need resources in September. Corporate partners plan in fiscal quarters. The campaign structure was working against the work.
Every year the identity was rebuilt from zero, partner toolkits shipped as static PDFs that couldn't flex to any real channel, and message discipline eroded the moment April ended.
- Campaign identity was rebuilt annually, consuming budget and eliminating recognition equity.
- Partner toolkits were static PDFs that could not flex to different channels, formats, or audiences.
- Message discipline eroded outside April, producing off-brand derivatives in the field.
- No content cadence existed to carry momentum through the rest of the year.
- Production capacity was concentrated in Q1, creating a predictable annual bottleneck.
03 — The Insight
People don't ignore important issues because they don't care.
They ignore them because they don't know what to do next.
Awareness was never the bottleneck. Actionability was. So the platform was built to give every audience — survivor, ally, campus, corporate — a specific next step in every single month.
04 — The Big Idea
365 Days.
One Mission.
One Conversation.
A persistent campaign platform with fixed anchors and seasonal expressions — recognizable in any month, adaptable in every channel, and intensified rather than initiated each April.
05 — Strategy
How the solution was built
I designed the campaign as a platform with a persistent core and seasonal expressions — recognizable in any month, adaptable in every channel.
Research
Prior-year performance analysis, partner feedback, and drop-off modeling to locate the real failure point.
Audience
Segmented messaging for survivors, allies, campus partners, and corporate sponsors.
Messaging
A persistent narrative core with quarterly thematic expressions.
Brand
A flexible identity system with fixed anchors and variable surfaces.
Website
A phone-first campaign hub with pledge flows and shareable assets.
Social
Channel-native formats built for the platform, not resized from print.
A cadence mapped to the twelve-month calendar rather than April alone.
Events
Campus activations, tabling kits, banners, and wayfinding for community partners.
Partnerships
Modular, localizable toolkits that hundreds of partners could deploy without design support.
Accessibility
Contrast, caption, and alt-text standards embedded directly into every template.
06 — The Process
Eight phases, one throughline
Every phase carried a decision that shaped the next — and a lesson that outlived the project.
02
Research
Performance data, partner interviews, and channel analysis across the prior cycles.
Key decision
Prioritized partner usability over headquarters polish.
Lesson learned
The field is the real production team.
03
Strategy
Built the messaging architecture, twelve-month calendar, and quarterly expression model.
Key decision
Locked a persistent core before designing anything.
Lesson learned
Recognition equity compounds only when something stays fixed.
04
Creative Direction
Developed the platform concept and pressure-tested it in April and non-April scenarios.
Key decision
Required every concept to survive a quiet month.
Lesson learned
Design for the trough, not the peak.
05
Design
Produced modular kits spanning social, print, email, web, environmental, and event formats.
Key decision
Shipped editable kits, not locked PDFs.
Lesson learned
Control is not the same as consistency.
06
Review
Executive and partner review cycles run against usability criteria.
Key decision
Tested toolkits with real partners before launch.
Lesson learned
Partners find the failure modes headquarters can't see.
07
Launch
Executed the April peak across owned, earned, and partner channels simultaneously.
Key decision
Treated April as proof, not as the deliverable.
Lesson learned
A launch is a hypothesis test.
08
Optimization
Activated quarterly rhythm and refined assets against engagement data.
Key decision
Rebalanced production capacity across the year.
Lesson learned
Smoothing the calendar was the quiet win nobody asked for.
07 — Creative Gallery
The work, in context
The rollout proved the platform in April, then extended it deliberately across the remaining quarters.
— Visual Story
Selected Deliverables
Hover to enlarge. Click any piece for an immersive view.
CampaignMobile ExperienceToolkitStrategyDashboardEnvironmental DesignPresentation
CampaignMulti-Platform Campaign
One system expressed natively across Instagram, LinkedIn, Stories, out-of-home, and partner toolkits.
Mobile ExperienceMobile Campaign Hub
Landing pages, pledge forms, and shareables built for a phone-first audience.
ToolkitPartner Toolkit
Localizable kits that let hundreds of partners activate without breaking the brand.
StrategyEditorial Calendar & Strategy
Twelve months of themes, moments, and formats mapped before design began.
DashboardCampaign Performance
Reach, partner adoption, and sustained engagement reported to leadership quarterly.
Environmental DesignCampus Activations
Physical expressions — banners, tabling, and wayfinding — for community partners.
PresentationExecutive Campaign Brief
The always-on argument that replaced an annual thirty-day push.
08 — Creative Leadership
Leading the Work
I led the creative vision and coordinated the cross-functional machine required to keep a national campaign running continuously.
Creative Direction
Set and defended the creative vision for a national, always-on campaign, holding a single standard across every surface and every team.
Executive Alignment
Translated creative decisions into business language so leadership could sponsor the work rather than react to it.
Cross-functional Leadership
Brought programs, communications, development, and technology into one shared plan with one shared definition of done.
Creative Operations
Designed intake, review, and delivery so quality was produced by the system, not rescued by heroics.
Budget Management
Scoped and sequenced spend against impact, delivering within existing operating budget without diluting ambition.
Stakeholder Engagement
Ran structured working sessions that surfaced objections early and converted skeptics into advocates.
Vendor Management
Selected partners, set specifications and quality gates, and owned accountability for external production.
AI Integration
Introduced AI-assisted production for routine work, redirecting the team's hours toward strategy and craft.
Accessibility
Made WCAG 2.1 AA an upstream design input, protecting both the audience and the institution.
Governance
Documented decision rights, escalation paths, and review cadence so speed never came at the cost of consistency.
Brand Stewardship
Protected equity over time — treating the brand as an asset with a balance sheet, not a style preference.
Decision Making
Made the calls that unblocked the work, and made the reasoning visible so the team could make the next ones without me.
- Teams Led
- Creative, digital, and content
- Collaboration
- Communications, development, programs
- External
- National and campus partners
- Cadence
- Year-round production calendar
09 — Organizational Impact
What changed
The platform changed both the audience relationship and the internal economics of the campaign.
0M+
People Reached
Across owned, earned, and partner channels
0%
Increase in Engagement
Year-over-year across campaign channels
0+
Media Placements
National and regional coverage
0%
Email Performance
Lift in open and click-through rates
0%
Social Sharing
Increase in partner and audience amplification
0
Months of Activation
Up from a single-month push
Hundreds
Partners Enabled
Self-serve, localizable toolkits
National
Recognition
Campaign adoption beyond the organization
- Message consistency improved measurably across partner-generated materials.
- Recognition equity compounded year over year instead of resetting each April.
- Partner satisfaction rose as toolkits became genuinely usable without design support.
- The creative team regained Q1 capacity for strategic work.
10 — Behind the Work
Behind the Work
In her own words
The instinct with an awareness campaign is to make it louder. I've never seen louder work. What I've seen work is making the next step obvious.
So the first thing I did was stop designing and go look at what happened on May 1st. The answer was: nothing. Partners who had been enthusiastic in April had no reason to post in May, because we'd never given them one. That's not an audience problem. That's a supply problem, and supply is a leadership responsibility.
The hardest tradeoff was giving up control of the assets. Sending editable toolkits into the field means some partner, somewhere, will stretch the logo. I decided that risk was smaller than the certainty of eleven silent months, and I built enough structure into the templates that the sloppy version still reads as ours.
The decision I'm proudest of is one nobody outside the team noticed: we redistributed production across the year. The Q1 crunch had been treated as a fact of nature. It wasn't — it was a consequence of the campaign model. Fixing the model gave a small team its capacity back, and capacity is what makes strategic work possible at all.
Design for the eleventh month
Anything that only works at peak intensity will not survive the quiet quarters. Sustainability is a design constraint.
Enablement is distribution
Partners are the real channel. Making them self-sufficient multiplied reach far more than additional owned content would have.
Equity compounds
Resisting the annual rebuild was the single highest-return decision — recognition is an asset you can only accumulate.
What I'd improve
I would instrument partner-level usage analytics earlier to prioritize toolkit investment with harder evidence.
“She took the busiest month of our year and turned it into a system we can run every month. That changed what our partners are able to do with us.”
11 — Related Work
More executive case studies
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