For more than 30 years, Community Support Services (CSS) has provided an array of essential services for thousands of Summit County adults living with severe and persistent mental illness. But despite the agency’s longevity, awareness of its full scope of services has been lacking in the community. CEO Bob Stokes, who took the helm in 2018, made it his mission to change that, and now CSS is rolling out a new look and marketing initiatives to help promote CSS as a “one-stop shop” for comprehensive services beyond mental healthcare.
“CSS provides a very comprehensive spectrum of behavioral and physical health services to meet the often-complex needs of our clients. For many years, our organization has been almost exclusively associated with the treatment of individuals with severe and persistent mental illness, specifically psychiatry and case management,” Stokes said. “We are not the same CSS of the past, rather, we are an agency that has transformed itself into one with a renewed commitment to help effectively navigate any and all challenges our clients might encounter regarding their behavioral health.”
A team of CSS staff and Board members launched a search for a marketing and advertising agency that would not only raise awareness of CSS but help the agency move toward its larger goals of increasing visits to its Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), and boost philanthropic support. After a thorough search and review process, the committee chose Cuyahoga Falls-based TRIAD. Previously, TRIAD had worked with CSS to design its annual report and provided website design and development.
As part of the new partnership, TRIAD has taken steps to refresh the CSS brand and create a new logo and tagline. The goal was to come up with a logo that more effectively spoke to CSS’s growing role in the community and its expanded services. The resulting logo is a sphere that represents the client’s life, encircling overlapping multi-colored lines that represent the web of supportive services CSS provides to its clients. The tagline chosen - “Behavioral Healthcare & Wellness” - includes CSS services beyond behavioral healthcare, such as homeless outreach, supportive housing and supportive employment.
TRIAD also has begun updating the CSS website, www.cssbh.org, and has begun radio and digital advertising campaigns, including Facebook ads that helped to make CSS’s Aug. 6 Art of Recovery virtual fundraiser a resounding success. Future advertising plans call for strategic use of billboards, bus boards, Google searches, social media platforms, marketing materials and video opportunities.