Challenge

How do you promote a new retirement community and sell its units when the campus has not yet been built? This was the challenge faced by Acacia Creek Masonic Senior Living Community, a new continuing care retirement community created by and for California Masons. 

Acacia Creek needed a visual identity, messaging, and marketing materials to educate members of their fraternity about the new community and ultimately inspire them to make the campus their home. To add to the challenge: the community needed to get a 70% "sold" commitment in order to begin construction on the campus.

Solution

Having worked extensively with the California Masonic Homes prior to the birth of Acacia Creek, Jiva Creative understood well the target audience for the new community: California Mater Masons, their wives, widows and mothers.

With the values and needs of the audience firmly in mind, Jiva Creative embarked on an in-depth branding process whereby we developed a new image for the community complete with logo, visual identity, messaging and tagline, marketing materials, and website. The final messaging was targeted towards fostering a sense of shared values and creating a compelling story about the lifestyle that would come with residence at Acacia Creek.

With the visual identity and message firmly in place, Jiva applied the community branding to a campaign of newsletters, postcards, and sales packets and has assisted the organization with trade show concepting and booth production as well.

Results

With the help of our successful branding and marketing effort, Acacia Creek was able to secure the 70% commitment necessary to begin construction on their new campus. And, our direct mail and newsletter efforts continue to receive praise from those in the Masonic organization.

The Acacia marketing team is now able to manage the day-to-day operations of their website, including adding events and receiving registration information from interested attendees, with the aid of the content management framework we installed with the Acacia Creek website.

Postscript

Due to the success of our our initial engagement to provide branding and marketing material development, Jiva has continued to partner with Acacia Creek to further refine the messaging of the organization and provide ongoing design and marketing support. Because we know the Acacia audience so well, we have also taken on copywriting efforts and it is not uncommon to find one or more Jiva members jetting off to an Acacia event to photograph the festivities.

The Acacia Creek logo earned an Award of Distinction honor in the Communicator Awards 2007 competition and a Silver Award in the Hermes Award 2007 competition.