Alzheimers NZ is the national peak body for dementia in Aotearoa, supporting people living with dementia, their whānau and carers, and advocating for system-wide change. Obvious has worked alongside Alzheimers NZ and the broader dementia community on a range of cause-led brand and creative initiatives, including Create for Dementia, an arts-led programme that uses creative practice to support people living with dementia.
Why this category is different
Charity creative is its own discipline. The audience is wide and emotionally varied: people newly diagnosed, families navigating long-term care, healthcare professionals, donors, government stakeholders. Each touchpoint has to land for someone whose relationship to the cause may be deeply personal, while also moving fundraising and advocacy outcomes that the organisation depends on. The brief that has shaped our work in this space has been steady: communications that respect what dementia actually is, do not lean on stereotype or pity, and still motivate the action the cause needs.
The Strategic Discipline
Three principles have framed the work.
- Dignity over drama. The temptation in cause work is to dial up the emotional contrast — heart-breaking before, hopeful after. People living with dementia and their families have been on the receiving end of that storytelling for decades. The work that earns trust is the work that does not perform their experience back at them.
- Specificity over slogan. National-charity creative often defaults to abstract calls to compassion. The work we are proudest of is specific: a particular fact about prevalence, a specific support service, a single moment of recognition. Specificity does the persuasion that abstraction cannot.
- System over campaign. Charities run on small communications teams and large output. Anything we make has to be reusable, easy to maintain, and easy to extend without an agency holding the pen.
Create for Dementia
Our most extensive engagement in the dementia community has been the Create for Dementia programme, an arts-led initiative that uses creative practice — making, drawing, music, storytelling — to support cognition, identity and connection for people living with dementia. Obvious worked with Apera and the wider Create for Dementia team on the brand identity, programme communications and event materials. The full Create for Dementia case study covers the work in detail.
Adjacent and supporting work
Our work in this category has also extended into awareness creative timed to key calendar moments (including Dementia Action Week), bilingual community-facing materials, and visual systems for sector engagement with healthcare professionals and partner organisations. The output is intentionally restrained: strong typography, considered photography that shows people in their actual lives, a colour system that reads as serious without being clinical.
Why This Mattered
Cause work is one of the truest tests of a creative discipline. There is no premium price 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 around the discipline of specificity, dignity, and reusability. Working in the dementia space has been one of the most clarifying engagements for how we think about cause-led work, and it has shaped the way we approach every public-good and not-for-profit brief that has come into the studio since.
Services
- Messaging and tone of voice
- Campaign strategy and planning
- Graphic design and illustration
- Visual identity
- Social and digital
Working in not-for-profit, public-good or sensitive cause areas? Start a conversation with us about how a brand partnership built around dignity, specificity and reusability could support the work you do.