— Case Study · 3 min read
AISM
People Before Metrics
AISM's communication was accurate, thorough, and completely cold. Statistics, medical data, program details — everything you needed to know. But nowhere could you find the people who actually lived with the condition. Of all the projects in this portfolio, this is the one I'm most proud of — and it has no KPI to justify it.
Hired to
Volunteer. No formal brief, no budget, no agency.
Ended up
Full narrative rebrand — concept, copywriting, art direction — 100% community-endorsed.
100%
Community endorsement
0€
Budget
1
Narrative shift: data → people
AISM Reggio Emilia is a small local chapter of the Italian Multiple Sclerosis Association, based in northern Italy. A volunteer organization. A community of people navigating a difficult condition together. I came in with no brief, no budget, no agency behind me. Just me and a community that had something important to say.
The existing communication wasn't bad. It was thorough. Pages of information — statistics, medical data, program details. Everything you needed to know about multiple sclerosis. But nowhere in it could you find the people who actually lived with it. It read like a technical manual. Accurate, complete, and completely cold. But where were the people?
Working alone, I redesigned the narrative from scratch. The concept became Explosion of Colors — a direct rejection of the cold, data-heavy aesthetic, built around how the community actually felt about itself. No focus groups. No stakeholder presentations. Just careful listening, and a genuine attempt to translate what I heard into something visible.
↑ The 'Explosion of Colors' brochure: the shift from institutional communication to a portrait of the community. People at the center, not data about their condition.
When the brochure landed, the reaction was immediate. No KPI will ever measure what it meant to those people to finally see themselves — not their diagnosis — on that page. 100% community endorsement. But that number doesn't really capture it.
Marketing built on dignity is more powerful than marketing built on data alone. People don't engage because they feel informed — they engage because they feel seen. This project taught me that the most important metric is sometimes the one you can't put in a spreadsheet.
I would have documented the creative process more thoroughly — the conversations with the community, the directions explored and discarded, the iterations that didn't make it. The final brochure is strong, but the path to get there was just as interesting and I lost almost all of it. Not a technical mistake. A habit mistake.
No dashboard can measure what it feels like
to finally be seen the way you see yourself.
Volunteer strategic communications · AISM Reggio Emilia · 2025