MaineHealth

Summary: Marketing, branding, graphic design, and web development for a broad range of community health related projects
Client: MaineHealth
Location: Portland, Maine

Since 2013, Perch has worked with MaineHealth on a wide variety of initiatives to support their excellent community health work with high quality branding, marketing plans, print materials, and digital assets. These projects have included everything from simple one-off flyer templates to custom web applications for sharing project data to multi-year, multi-hospital marketing campaigns.

Communities Transforming

In 2013, Perch was hired by MaineHealth as the communication, marketing, and technology team for a statewide project involving seven community hospitals in seven of Maine’s most rural counties. The goal of this project was to increase access to healthy choices in each of the seven communities, with the long-term goal of reducing the burden of chronic disease across the state. Each community’s work was tailored to its unique needs and executed according to its own capacity, increasing the overall effectiveness of the grant-funded project by allowing each organization to determine their own approach.

In addition to developing campaigns for many of the sub-projects, we were tasked with unifying the various initiatives under a single umbrella brand, Communities Transforming, which provided a conceptual foundation for individual community campaigns. To support this central brand, Perch also designed and developed a custom online project-sharing hub, based on the Angular.js framework, that allows community health organizations to showcase their work in a consistent format and learn from the successes and failures of similar projects.

Each county’s identity beneath the Communities Transforming brand featured slight variations to tie each mark to the local geography.

Initiative sub-brands all drew from the same expansive color palette and typographic guidelines to maintain some consistency while allowing each initiative to stand on its own.

Each initiative’s brand was then used as the foundation for a variety of program-supporting marketing materials and collateral. At the end of the project, each initiative was presented with a guide to use for future design work, plus boilerplate copy for PR, social media guidelines, and design templates for flyers and other simple in-house collateral.

Check Plus Choices

In 2015, we continued our work with MaineHealth on a simple but surprisingly novel concept: labeling the healthy foods in hospital cafeterias.

Two factors contributed to the difficulty in this executing this concept. Hospitals are stressful places for visitors and staff alike, and treating yourself to a soda to cope with the stress is certainly not an act that should be publicly shamed. Additionally, most hospital cafeterias are self-contained, financially independent units, and therefore they need to deal with staffing limitations and they need to generate a profit.

We addressed these concerns and others with a super simple conceptual approach to the project: eliminate negativity from the labeling system, provide positive reinforcement for healthy choices, and above all, create a system that is first and foremost a simple way to distinguish healthy options from others. This basic mark was then extrapolated into a series of educational materials that became the basis for a multiyear healthy food and nutrition campaign.

From the First Tooth

In 2017, Perch was tasked with rebranding two MaineHealth initiatives that promote healthy dental habits in children and pregnant women. Using the existing (and slightly menacing) tooth mascot as a necessary starting point due to its recognition among statewide providers, Perch created two playful marks with related color palettes but distinct tag lines and aesthetics.

Case Study

Communities Transforming

Check Plus Choices

From the First Tooth

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