By Lance Lunsford, MBA, FACHE
Groundswell Health Senior Partner and Co-founder
When we began a redesign of Inner Circle Autism Network’s website, Groundswell Health knew a local feel for each facility would be a critical aspect. For a growing national brand, that can be a challenge.
That kind of insight informed what eventually became recognized with the Gold Aster Award for Website Design for 2025.
When you represent clients with clinics in various locations across the country, tending to the details around each respective geography is the easy place to start, but it really requires an interest in what is important to each community that results in successfully connecting with those towns. It’s more than superficial images of a skyline. It really requires attention to detail and seeking out those unique aspects of a community where its people find pride, definition, and purpose.
That approach yields a sense of authority and local ownership of the highest authority on high-quality care. Seeking out those unique aspects of a community comes as second nature. Growing up in West Texas, I moved around following the 1980s oil bust that sent my family from Midland to Abilene and then San Angelo in the course of a handful of years. Between the fifth grade and my sophomore year of high school, I experienced a new school every year. In each transition, there was new time spent in silence among others. It leaves you time to observe, reflect, and calibrate to your surroundings. Certainly, it feels like you are inoculating yourself from the loneliness in the time it takes to develop new social relationships, but the time revealed the common threads that tie together each community. It was a challenge, but I learned much about people along the way.
In each of those communities, it struck me that each region had a unique nickname. They also had their major players. I enjoyed figuring out who the go-to big names were in each town. Who’s the mayor? Who’s the most recognizable name in locally owned business? Who’s the grumpy local scoundrel? I developed an early curiosity in local influencers and recognizable local landmarks that defined the various towns.
From the Midland oil and gas town known as the “Tall City” to the gently rolling hills around Abilene known as the “Big Country”, the regional taglines gave identities to locals. San Angelo’s “Concho Valley”. Lubbock’s “Hub City”. College Station’s “Brazos Valley”. The “Hill Country” of Central Texas. In these places, there’s a common human thread that exists in every geography. There’s a local pride associated with physical locations anchored in their history, industry, and nature.
With each transition into a new place, I found that people weren’t always happy to have a newcomer merging into their cliques or niche groups. With a closer look at the response, however, I realized what was really coming out was an expression of fear of disruption and comfort. The idea that someone might challenge what they’ve identified as valuable was a threat. So, I quickly figured out ways to co-own shared values and relate through an authentic demonstration of them. Doing that with the right timing could endear you to the crowd and help with the uneasy transition time whether it was at a new school, a new Boy Scout troop, or a new team.
Today, when we take on a new client, one of the first things we identify is the local identity through what was once a colloquial shorthand for a region before turning into something more formal. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a great place to start. For Inner Circle Autism Network, setting a local identity for a growing national website is a challenge without this ingrained into your operation. Each clinic location needed its own unique presence. It helped secure a Gold Aster Award for Website Design as we found ways to set each clinic location with unique locally identifiable landmarks. The Aster Awards recognize excellence in healthcare advertising, marketing and communications. Entries are reviewed by a panel of industry experts and evaluated across areas including creativity, design, typography, production, knowledge transfer and overall quality.
We want our clients’ target audiences to instantly feel familiar when they click into a client’s site. Each clinic location for ICAN needs to feel like a local community before establishing other authority on how they go about serving their needs. This subtly helps secure a decision-maker who might be experiencing their own uneasy transition time. Whether they’re navigating a new situation for their child or help do research for a potential solution for a loved one, we take this time to address the details of a web presence in a way that eases audiences.
Our content for clients has always focused on establishing a voice of influence and insight their target audiences can trust. Combined with the heuristics that affect an audience with a sense of trust, we further convey the authority our clients have in areas that speak to their superior abilities to meet the needs of their communities.
But by doing more to endear them in unique ways is how we do the small things that might not make it into the planning session or the posted RFP. It certainly won’t show up in response to an AI prompt, and that’s how we go the distance and do more to help create each client’s groundswell.
