How Obvious built Create for Dementia as the cognitive counterpart to Move for Dementia — and ran a four-year brand and campaign partnership with Alzheimers NZ.

Alzheimers NZ · Brand & Campaign Partner · 2021–2024 · Not-for-Profit · Peak Body · Healthcare

A multi-year creative partnership with Aotearoa New Zealand’s national peak body for dementia mate wareware — covering brand strategy, campaign creative, platform launch, programme communications and digital fundraising across more than ten distinct programmes.

Client Alzheimers NZ  ·  Sector Not-for-Profit · Peak Body · Healthcare  ·  Years 2021–2024  ·  Scope Brand strategy, campaign creative, platform launch, brand architecture, programme communications, digital fundraising

At a glance

• Client: Alzheimers NZ — Aotearoa’s national peak body for dementia mate wareware, representing 70,000+ New Zealanders living with dementia today
• Engagement: Multi-year retainer (2021–2024) covering brand identity, campaign strategy, creative production, brand architecture, programme communications and digital fundraising
• Headline outcomes: Created and launched Create for Dementia, the cognitive-activity counterpart to Move for Dementia. Refreshed Move for Dementia’s brand toolkit and brokered its pro-bono media partnerships. Raised $67,000+ across confirmed campaigns. Added 1,000+ supporters to the database. Earned a Campaign Brief NZ feature and selection as Canva’s headline NZ case study at SXSW 2024
• Right fit if: You’re a peak body, national charity, public-good organisation, healthcare communicator or cause-led brand needing a creative partner who can hold brand discipline across many programmes, audiences and years

The client

Alzheimers NZ is the national peak body for dementia mate wareware in Aotearoa New Zealand — providing support, advocacy and resources for the 70,000+ Kiwis currently living with dementia, their whānau, the carers and healthcare professionals working alongside them, the policy stakeholders shaping the response, and the network of regional Alzheimers organisations across the motu.

Between 2021 and 2024, Obvious served as Alzheimers NZ’s strategic creative partner — running the brand architecture, campaign systems and programme communications that carried the work into the wider New Zealand dementia community, and developing the digital fundraising platforms that have become annual moments on the organisation’s calendar.

There is a lot happening and so much pro-bono work which is amazing to see. Thanks again.— Rebecca Scelly FFINZ, Fundraising Manager, Alzheimers NZ

The brief beneath every brief

National peak bodies have one of the hardest creative jobs in the country. Six distinct audiences need to be moved by the same brand — people living with dementia, their whānau, paid and unpaid carers, healthcare professionals, donors, and policy stakeholders — and each touchpoint had to read with dignity for someone whose relationship to the cause may be deeply personal.

Charity creative defaults to emotional contrast: heart-breaking before, hopeful after. The audience has been on the receiving end of that storytelling for decades, and it doesn’t earn trust anymore. The work that does is built on three disciplines we held to across every project for Alzheimers NZ:

Dignity over drama.

We never performed the audience’s experience back at them. Restraint, specificity and quiet competence consistently outperformed contrast-driven creative for this audience.

Specificity over slogan.

The programmes worked because of specific people doing specific things in specific places. The language stayed close to that.

Built to be reused.

Each campaign extended and reinforced the brand system rather than starting from zero — so community arts practitioners, healthcare comms teams, Alzheimers NZ’s in-house staff, and freelance media partners could all deploy the work without losing voice.

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The work

Move for Dementia — refreshing the platform and brokering its media engine 2021–2022

The first major engagement, and the foundation everything else compounded on.

Move for Dementia was Alzheimers NZ’s existing team-based fundraising platform. Our job wasn’t to invent it — it was to give it a contemporary brand toolkit, a modern visual identity, and the media infrastructure to compete in a crowded New Zealand fundraising calendar.

Obvious developed the refreshed visual identity, the brand toolkit, and the full launch creative — posters at A0/A1/A3, A5 flyers, social tiles, email templates, web banners, and partner outreach kits. Off the back of the brief we also brokered the national poster partnership with Shout Media that has carried Alzheimers NZ campaigns ever since, delivering hundreds of pro-bono placements across the network over the years that followed.

Single-edition results: 59 registered teams, 582 individual donors, $32,377 raised, and 556 new newsletter subscribers added to the Alzheimers NZ supporter base. Proof that a peak body that had previously relied on direct mail and phone giving could now run a contemporary, multi-channel digital fundraising platform end-to-end.

Brain Health Challenge — top of funnel, with substance 2022

A 14-day email programme designed to engage a top-of-funnel audience around dementia risk reduction. Obvious produced the email series creative, the daily infographic system (healthy-food swaps, brain-active behaviours), and a gender-segmented Brain Health Quiz that tested message-market fit across demographic targets.

The Challenge turned brain-health education — typically a hard-to-engage content category — into a low-friction acquisition product that drove sign-ups into the wider Alzheimers NZ supporter base.

This has come together really well — congratulations! It’ll be interesting to track the participants of this to see if we are hitting our demographic targets.— Rebecca Scelly, on the Brain Health Challenge launch

Book of Puzzles — fundraising-product support 2022

Digital marketing and tracking support for the Alzheimers NZ Book of Puzzles — a fundraising product targeting an audience adjacent to the Challenge cohort. Obvious set up the GTM and conversion tracking, integrated the landing page, and resolved attribution issues so the team could measure performance on a small but strategically interesting product.

Detective Luka — digital fundraising experimentation 2021–2022

Concept and digital strategy support on Detective Luka, an Instagram and Facebook–led digital fundraising experiment. Obvious supported the platform and format thinking and the channel mix as Alzheimers NZ’s then-Digital Fundraiser tested new mechanics for engaging a younger digital audience.

Annual Appeal scoping (“Alicia”) 2022

Strategic creative scoping for the 2022 Alzheimers NZ Annual Appeal, designed for the organisation’s existing donor base. The brief was ultimately deferred and folded into the next campaign cycle — but the work directly informed how subsequent appeals were sequenced against the broader campaign calendar.

Create for Dementia — the strategic evolution 2023–2024

Create for Dementia was the platform we invented — the strategic and creative answer to the gap in Alzheimers NZ’s fundraising architecture. If Move addressed the physical-activity prevention pathway, Create addressed the cognitive one.

An arts-led community fundraising platform inviting Kiwis to set themselves a creative challenge for the month of June. Creative practice — making, drawing, music, storytelling — strengthens neural connections and supports cognition, identity and connection for people at risk of, or living with, dementia. The campaign mechanic followed the science.

The audience design followed the strategy. Move for Dementia engaged the athletic, team-based audience brilliantly. Create for Dementia opened a second front door for the creative-leaning, female-skewed audience — the people most likely to honour a loved one by making something.

What Obvious built for Create for Dementia

• The brand from scratch — name, identity system, visual language, layout grammar, tone of voice
• The hero campaign creative — video, key art and the platform aesthetic carried across every channel
• The website — createfordementia.org.nz, integrated with the Grassrootz fundraising platform
• The full channel mix — Meta, Google Search & Display, YouTube pre-roll, TVNZ+, Stuff, Pinterest, Reddit, Shout Media street posters across Wellington and Christchurch, plus pro-bono StreetLED placement in 40+ Auckland residential apartment buildings and a free position inside My Mahi (~8,000 daily views)
• The earned-media strategy — pitched and landed in Campaign Brief NZ, which became the #1 Google result for the campaign name within a week of launch
• The creator community — a private Facebook group with weekly supportive content, live moderation, and a partnership with Arepa as the prize sponsor

What it produced

Year 1 (2023): Almost 150 creative teams and individuals registered, raising $35,000+ for Alzheimers NZ — a brand-new platform that hit a respectable five-figure result in its first June.

Year 2 (2024): The platform scaled in its second edition. Pinterest, Reddit and the private creator community were introduced mid-flight when registrations under-tracked. A real-time conversion-rate insight lifted opt-ins on the donation flow from ~30% back toward Alzheimers NZ’s ~90% benchmark. Campaign Brief NZ ran the launch.

The platform now exists. It’s an annual moment on the Alzheimers NZ calendar that didn’t exist before this partnership.

Creativity is not only an outlet for expression but a powerful tool for cognitive health. We invite everyone to join in, from knitters and bakers to woodworkers and graphic designers. Every creation counts towards fighting dementia mate wareware.— Catherine Hall, Chief Executive, Alzheimers NZ

Kia ora team — this is great. Love the colour and the creative. Let’s go CFD.— Helen Kelland MFINZ, Donor Relationships Manager, on the Year 2 launch creative

Picked up by the industry

Create for Dementia was featured in Campaign Brief NZ at Year 2 launch, and the platform’s creative production became Canva’s headline New Zealand case study at SXSW 2024.

Brand architecture, infrastructure & always-on 2021–2024

Underneath the named campaigns sat the year-round work that kept the brand coherent:

• Social channel management for Alzheimers NZ across Facebook, Instagram and the campaign-specific handles, run via SocialPilot
• Dementia Friends infrastructure — Mailchimp audience management and recurring imports (the database of New Zealanders signed up to learn more about dementia-friendly community practice)
• Donor appeal creative across World Alzheimers Month (September), the Christmas / Holiday Appeals (November–December), and the End of Financial Year Appeal
• Editorial discipline — the steady week-by-week work that let every new programme plug into the same brand voice without losing its own specificity

The system carried more than ten distinct programmes, plus the always-on calendar moments — every one of them reinforcing the brand architecture rather than starting from scratch.

The discipline behind the work

Cause work is one of the truest tests of creative discipline. There’s no premium price tag to charge, no awards-show showmanship that helps the actual outcome, no creative ego that survives the audience’s real lived experience. The brands and campaigns that hold up are the ones built on specificity, dignity and reusability — not on contrast, slogans, or single-campaign thinking.

Inside the Alzheimers NZ partnership we made this principle operational:

• One coherent organisational voice across every campaign — awareness moments, fundraising appeals, programme communications, partner activations
• Communications systems runnable by multiple teams — community arts practitioners, healthcare communications staff, in-house comms, and freelance media partners all deployed the system without losing voice
• Brand infrastructure that compounded — each new campaign extended the architecture rather than re-inventing it, so the per-campaign creative cost trended down while ambition trended up
• Pro-bono media built into the model — relationships with Shout Media, StreetLED, TVNZ, Stuff and My Mahi that repeatedly delivered six-figure-equivalent placement on the cause’s terms
• Audience-first segmentation — separate platforms for athletic-team audiences (Move) and creative-maker audiences (Create), keeping each one’s voice and conversion design native rather than compromised
• Iteration in flight, not in retrospect — mid-campaign pivots to Pinterest and Reddit when C4D Year 2 registrations under-tracked, and live opt-in copy optimisation when conversion-rate data flagged a gap

FAQs

What did Obvious do for Alzheimers NZ?

Obvious served as Alzheimers NZ’s strategic creative partner from 2021 to 2024 — running brand architecture, campaign creative, programme communications and digital fundraising platform design across more than ten distinct programmes, including Create for Dementia, Move for Dementia, the Brain Health Challenge, Detective Luka, Book of Puzzles, the 2022 Annual Appeal scoping, and the year-round donor appeals across World Alzheimers Month, Christmas / Holiday Appeals and End of Financial Year.

Did Obvious create Move for Dementia?

No. Move for Dementia is Alzheimers NZ’s existing team-based fundraising platform. Obvious refreshed its visual identity, built the modern brand toolkit, and brokered the pro-bono media partnership with Shout Media that the campaign has used ever since.

Did Obvious create Create for Dementia?

Yes. Create for Dementia was invented by Obvious as the strategic and creative counterpart to Move for Dementia. Where Move addresses the physical-activity dementia-prevention pathway, Create addresses the cognitive-activity one — keeping the brain engaged through creative practice. Obvious built the brand, the website, the campaign creative, the channel mix, the earned-media strategy and the creator community from scratch.

How much did the partnership raise for Alzheimers NZ?

Confirmed totals across two named campaigns alone: $32,377 from Move for Dementia and $35,000+ from Year 1 of Create for Dementia — totalling more than $67,000. The aggregate runs significantly higher when always-on appeals, Year 2 of Create for Dementia, and other programme activity are included.

Why is this case study in past tense?

The retainer wrapped in 2024 after four years. The platforms, the brand systems and the digital fundraising engine Obvious built for Alzheimers NZ continue to run today — Move for Dementia and Create for Dementia are both still annual moments on the organisation’s calendar.

What kinds of clients does Obvious work with?

Obvious partners with national peak bodies, public-good organisations, healthcare communicators, education and research providers, Crown entities, cultural institutions, and cause-led brands across Aotearoa New Zealand — designing brand systems built on specificity, dignity and reusability.