SummitStone Health Partners
Purpose before everything
Focus:
Employer Brand Transformation & Value Strategy Development
Key Elements:
Decision-Dynamics Research, Creative Direction, Content Strategy, UX Design, Career Site Reinvention, Storytelling.
The Challenge
SummitStone Health Partners was built on a mission that traces its roots to Robert F. Kennedy's push in the 1960s to care for the most vulnerable members of society. Decades later, that founding spirit was still alive inside the organization. SummitStone served people with limited options for behavioral and mental health care, working alongside local government, social workers, corrections systems, and communities across Northern Colorado. The CEO was committed to something beyond operational excellence: a genuine transformation of the organization around equity, inclusion, and human dignity.
The problem was that none of that came through in how SummitStone showed up to job seekers. The brand wasn't reflecting the depth of the mission or the distinctiveness of the culture. For an organization that depended on recruiting clinicians, therapists, case managers, and support staff who shared its values, that gap had real consequences.
Finding the Insight
The research was comprehensive: employee surveys, one-on-one interviews, leadership workshops, talent competitor auditing, brand auditing, and job seeker shadowing that put us inside the actual candidate experience, reading what they read, seeing what they saw, following the path they followed. What emerged was a portrait of an organization with an unusually strong internal identity and an external presence that wasn't keeping pace with it.
The people who worked at SummitStone didn't just have jobs. They had convictions. They chose this work because something in them demanded it. The brand needed to speak directly to people wired the same way, and make clear that SummitStone was a place where those convictions weren't just welcome, they were the point.
The Strategy
The positioning centered on a simple, flexible construct: a rotating headline that cycled through the values at the heart of the organization. Community. Belonging. Inclusion. Purpose. Togetherness. Equity. Justice. Each word named something real about the culture, and together they signaled that SummitStone wasn't built around a single value but around a way of seeing the world. The animation that brought this to life on the career site let the words cycle through, each one landing with equal weight, each one extending an invitation to a different person who might see themselves in it.
The visual identity matched the ambition. A rich, deliberately diverse color system moved away from the clinical blues and greens that dominate behavioral health recruiting, signaling warmth, energy, and a genuine commitment to the representation SummitStone claimed as a core value.
What We Built
The engagement covered brand strategy, a comprehensive brand guide, and a fully designed career site built to express the platform across every audience SummitStone needed to reach, from licensed clinicians and therapists to case managers, behavioral health technicians, and administrative staff. A dedicated photography shoot across three locations produced an original image library that put real SummitStone people and communities at the center of the brand. The work included mobile-optimized design, DEI-forward content architecture, a total rewards section, and location-specific pages for the facilities SummitStone operated across the region.
The Result
A brand that matched the seriousness of its mission and the depth of its culture. For an organization whose entire model depends on attracting people driven by purpose, that alignment is the foundation everything else gets built on. The site remained live and in use for years after launch, a signal that the work held up well beyond the moment it was delivered.