Funded to save lives. Graded on whether people show up.

The Department of Veterans Affairs engaged STRIVE3 to help modernize and elevate the national identity of Vet Centers, an essential yet often overlooked resource providing confidential counseling and readjustment support to Veterans, service members, and their families. STRIVE3 directed and developed the marketing effort from research insights to a fully integrated plan. Our team led the strategic discovery process, created a unified messaging framework, and mapped the customer journey to ensure that Veterans, families, partners, and clinicians clearly understood the value and availability of Vet Center services.

Over the 12-month contract, STRIVE3 developed a national multi-channel campaign that blended broadcast, streaming, digital advertising, social media content, and targeted outreach. The scope included brand development, editorial planning, media-buy architecture, digital content creation, and the deployment of high-impact assets such as electronic media boards, social campaigns, and mission-aligned visuals.

The campaign strengthened national awareness of Vet Centers, helped clarify their life-changing services, and elevated their presence among both Veterans seeking support and clinicians considering careers in Veteran mental health.

In the period that followed, VA’s Readjustment Counseling Service institutionalized the same operating model. Its May 2025 national outreach-plan template requires every Vet Center to name its top three target markets, set three to five SMART goals, and measure against a 3 percent market-penetration target; GAO closed its outstanding outreach recommendation as implemented. Across the same window, the Vet Center Outreach Application recorded 22,660 Veteran leads in its first weeks of full deployment, and Readjustment Counseling visits rose roughly 5 percent, from 1.262 million in FY2024 to 1.325 million in FY2025.

MEDVAMC did not come to STRIVE3 needing a single advertisement. It needed a way to find out, with evidence rather than assumption, which message would actually move a Veteran who had screened positive for PTSD but had not yet started treatment.

STRIVE3 supported MEDVAMC’s research team in presenting a full range of established advertising approaches to focus groups of Veterans and family members, then asked participants which strategies they found most convincing. Testimonial messaging, delivered by someone the Veteran could relate to, was the strategy Veterans trusted most. Those findings shaped a story architecture built around a 2×2 experimental design, crossing delivery method with message content, plus two control videos: six finished videos, filmed over a two-day shoot on-site in Houston with Veteran participants, family members, and MEDVAMC clinicians.

MEDVAMC’s research team then tested the six advertisements with 600 Veterans who screened positive for PTSD but were not yet in treatment, randomly assigning each participant to one video and measuring attitudes toward psychotherapy, stigma, intention to seek treatment, willingness to recommend therapy to other Veterans, and, through chart review, whether Veterans went on to actually start care.

Those videos are the experimental intervention in a funded VA health services research study, IIR 21-035, running through September 2026 under a reported $922,673 award. VA frames the question as a marketing question: which direct-to-consumer message most effectively moves a Veteran who screens positive for PTSD, and is not in therapy, to begin evidence-based treatment, so that limited outreach dollars go to the messages that work. The findings are VA’s to publish. What the design already establishes is the standard we now build to: the creative was the variable, and the outcome measured was whether care actually began.