Veteran Outreach · National Multi-Channel · 2023–2024
VA Readjustment Counseling Service
The most effective program Veterans had never heard of
nationwide
and satellites
on one architecture
of performance
A problem VA named precisely
The Readjustment Counseling Service operates 300 Vet Centers, more than 80 Mobile Vet Centers and satellite locations, and a 24/7 call center. Services are confidential, free, available for life, and kept separate from VA and DoD records without the Veteran’s written consent.
Veterans who use them are, by VA’s own trust data, highly satisfied.
The problem was everyone else. In the contract’s own words, Veterans, service members and their families were either unaware the services existed, believed they were not eligible, or wished they had known sooner. In some regions the pattern was starker still: a high population of eligible individuals paired with a low utilization rate.
That is not a care problem. It is a distance problem between a program and the people it was built for. And it was widening, because eligibility had recently expanded by legislation and the program was growing, which meant more people who qualified and did not know it.
STRIVE3 directed the marketing effort end to end: discovery, strategy, messaging architecture, creative development, production, media planning, and delivery against the contract’s deliverable schedule.
Two audiences, one architecture
The work carried a second mandate alongside awareness. Expansion meant hiring, and Vet Centers needed clinicians willing to build a career in Veteran mental health. Recruiting a licensed counselor and reaching an avoidant Veteran are different persuasion problems with different objections and almost no shared motivation.
Both had to run off one brand, one message system, and one media architecture, deployable at national, regional and local level across 300 communities.
We led strategic discovery, built a unified messaging framework, and mapped how each audience actually finds the service, for four distinct groups: Veterans, families, community partners, and prospective clinicians.
What we built
Over a 12-month period of performance:
- 01
Research
An awareness assessment was already in place when we came onto the contract. We built an additional research layer on top of it, designed to complement and validate its findings on the eligible population and on the specific barriers standing between Veterans and care.
- 02
Strategy
A multi-year integrated marketing communications plan with strategies executable locally, regionally and nationally, plus a media buy plan built to VA Paid Advertising Handbook 8501 and structured for oversight approval before placement.
- 03
Creative and content
Video storytelling featuring real Veterans and Vet Center clinicians. Brand and editorial development. Digital brochure. Electronic media board slides built to communicate without audio, for deployment across VA medical centers, military bases, community mental health providers and USO lounges. Weekly executive newsletters, speeches, and a national presentation for use by program leadership.
- 04
Media
Media buy architecture spanning broadcast, streaming, search, social, programmatic audio on Veteran-focused podcasts, direct mail, email, and print, with Spanish-language outlets required in the plan.
VA Readjustment Counseling Service holds copyright to all materials produced under the task order.
The standard we were measured against
This contract did not evaluate the work on taste. It defined a scoreboard and inspected against it.
Written deliverables had to meet AP and VA style, carry no more than five combined grammar, punctuation or style errors, and hit a minimum Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score of 60 at an eighth-grade reading level or below. Graphics were held to documented design standards, VA graphics standards, and Vet Center messaging guidance, with no more than one revision permitted. Section 508 accessibility compliance carried its own performance standard: ninety percent of submissions accepted by the VA 508 Program Office on first pass, one hundred percent on revision. Deliverables were subject to 100 percent inspection.
Most creative work is judged after the fact. This was judged against published thresholds, monthly, with performance slippage counted.
8th grade or below
style errors allowed
100% on revision
of deliverables
The operating model that followed
In 2022, GAO found that Vet Center outreach lacked the audience data, metrics and targets needed to know whether it was working. We built the marketing framework during the period in which RCS was turning that finding into an operating system.
In May 2025, RCS provided GAO a new national outreach-plan template. It requires every Vet Center to identify its top three target markets, set three to five SMART goals, explain how it will implement them, and measure performance against a 3 percent market-penetration target. GAO closed the recommendation as implemented.
Target-market identification, SMART goals tied to utilization, defined KPIs, location-level measurement. Those are the same structures our awareness marketing plan was built on.
Two downstream numbers sit in the same window. The Vet Center Outreach Application recorded 22,660 Veteran leads between November 22, 2024 and January 10, 2025, its first weeks of full national deployment. Readjustment Counseling visits rose from 1.262 million in FY2024 to 1.325 million in FY2025, roughly 5 percent.
in first weeks of VCOA
now written into policy
FY2024 to FY2025
marked implemented
Many forces moved these results, and parts of the mandate predate us. What the public record shows is that in the period following the engagement, RCS institutionalized a targeted, measurable, performance-driven outreach model of the kind our framework was built around, and its own numbers moved with it.
Sources: GAO recommendation record on Vet Center outreach; VA FY2026 and FY2027 congressional budget submissions.
Why we point to this work
Two things came out of it that shape everything we do now.
The first is what we found when we got there. Research existed. It had not closed the gap. Knowing that a population is eligible and underserved is not the same as knowing where they are, what is stopping them, and which channel reaches them. We built a second research layer specifically to answer those questions, because the strategy could not be written without them.
The second is the shape of the problem itself. A high population of eligible individuals paired with low utilization is the exact condition facing nearly every organization we work with today: a county with abatement funds, a grantee with a program and no pipeline, a clinic with open capacity in a community that does not know it exists.
We have measured that gap at national scale. We build to close it.
What carries over to your program
Your service area is smaller than a national footprint. The problem is not.
- 01
Eligible population against actual utilization
We know how to locate the gap between who qualifies for a service and who uses it, and how to name the barriers in between. That measurement is the Reach Audit.
- 02
One message system, deployed locally
A framework that holds across four audiences and 300 communities is built to be handed to the people standing in them. Your site coordinators get assets they can use without a review cycle.
- 03
Work that clears a compliance review
Reading level, style, accessibility, and media placement approval are the requirements that stall outreach after the creative is approved. We have performed against all four on a federal quality scoreboard.
Claims on this page are drawn from the contract performance work statement and our own deliverable record. Documentation available on request.
Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center
Six videos built to a controlled experimental specification, tested on 600 Veterans who screened positive for PTSD and were not in treatment, with the outcome confirmed by chart review.
Find out who you are missing.
The Reach Audit takes three weeks and costs $8,500. You get a map of your service area, a baseline cost per qualified referral, and a message risk register. If the findings do not justify going further, you still keep the baseline.
Victor Rogers, Founder and President
Reston, Virginia · info@strive3.com