Volunteers of America, Los Angeles (VOALA) provides essential services to veterans returning from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their program aims to support these veterans, many of whom suffer invisible wounds such as PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury which make transitioning back to civilian life very difficult. 

VOALA is eager to increase awareness of their services and treatments among the younger generation of returning veterans, including young women veterans suffering the effects of military sexual trauma. They are also looking to elevate understanding among civilians about the consequences of war and generate dialogue between veterans and civilians – helping communities heal, and motivating individuals to both volunteer and donate to VOALA. 

Together, Jennifer Karady and Fraser Communications created a powerful campaign of narrative photographs in collaboration with veterans to tell their stories to help VOALA achieve these goals. The imagery will reveal the invisible ways that the trauma of war often affects veterans in their civilian lives, impacting families and communities. The campaign will utilize the latest forms of digital, mobile and social media marketing. 

 

The first step was to create a landing page for the campaign. It needed to provide a place for Brittny's story to live, an opportunity to highlight services that are sometimes diffcult to find or have been historically over looked on VOALA's current site, provide an easy way for visitors to contact VOALA quickly for more information, and information about the partners of the campaign — Getty, Jennifer Karady and Fraser Communications. I felt that this was asking quite a bit of a landing page and that a mircosite might be better fit. We also had a very small budget to work within. I chose to work within a Wordpress template that we could customize ourselves at Fraser and not have to send out for development which help cut costs significantlly and allowed us the ability to maintain the site easily oursleves for the the client. 

 

I chose a responsive paralax design due to the beautiful way it can lead the viewer on a journey to help guide them through the story in a fluid and easy to follow format. The lead-in page is of the image Jennifer Karady created paired with a quote from Brittny's true story to draw the audience in. From here the user may choose to scroll or click through to an explanation of the project and a full, large image of Jennifer Karady's photograph. The next scroll/click leads viewers to a break down of the image and it's hidden and not so hidden meanings, providing an opportunity for visitors to read Brittny's full story if they chose through a link to another page within the mircosite but separate from the main paralax landing. If they continue to scroll, they will learn about the many related services VOALA offers with quick links to each service, followed by contact information, a contact form for VOALA and ending with a bit of information about each of the partners in the projects with links to each of their websites for more information. 

 

Once the design was approved for the mircosite, I moved forward with the rest of the campaign which was also small due to a tight budget. I created an E-blast template to send out to a targeted mailing list and several digital, animated banner ads in a variety of sizes to market this new campaign through a small, local media buy my agency had planned. Below are a few highlights of my part of the work from this campaign.