JRMC 7014: Capstone Journey

May 2025 — May 2026

Emerging Media Workshop — Team CARE Capstone Project: Implementing and promoting the GA MIND project on the CARE Center site & social media.

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Project Date: May 2025 — May 2026

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Project Overview

For our capstone project, we had the opportunity to collaborate with Jenay Beer and Lisa Hammond from the Cognitive Aging Research and Education (CARE) Center to help promote their new research study, the Georgia Multidisciplinary Interventions for Neurodegenerative Disease (GA MIND) Project. The GA MIND project is a first-of-its-kind statewide research initiative designed to better understand and ultimately prevent dementia in Georgia adults, with a strong focus on rural civilians. We were tasked with building out the research study on their current site as well as creating promotional materials for their social media. For our deliverables, we have used various emerging technologies such as Figma, Wordpress, and Canva to help build and test our products.

The Problem

Research continues to show that more than half of Alzheimer’s cases may be preventable through simple lifestyle changes such as preserving vision, staying active, and eating nutritious foods. GA MIND aims to translate these findings into practical, accessible prevention strategies for communities across the state. One of the CARE team’s primary goals is to reach rural Georgians, who tend to be more skeptical of research studies and research in general.

Therefore the CARE Center has asked for 2 main deliverables from us:

1. Implement the GA MIND Project on the current CARE website so that users can easily understand, access, and enroll to the study.
2. Create promotional materials such as videos, social media posts, billboards, traditional advertising, and PR merch in order to build awareness and engagement around the new research study.

Our capstone project will help develop new strategies to spread knowledge around the GA MIND Project and strengthen trust in the CARE Center’s ongoing research efforts. It will also encourage continued involvement to ensure that all Georgians, and especially those in rural communities, fully benefit from the CARE Center’s resources and expertise.

The Solution

Before we could start building and promoting the GA MIND project, it was really important for us to understand everything about the research study. We spent the first half of our semester having numerous calls with Jenay and Lisa to understand the goals of the study, the target audience, the budget, the backend and front end structure of the site, the pain points, and most importantly their needs and wants.

Once we were able to really understand this information, we began looking through every page of the CARE site and brainstorming a list of improvements. We noted improvements from organization, to wording, to navigation functionality, to personalization, and much more. These initial recommendations served as a starting point for our redesign. From there we conducted a competitive analysis on other research facilities and studies that we could pull inspiration from. We examined studies like the Dog Aging Project, Framingham Heart Study, Blue Zones Project, and more. We looked at the navigation on these sites, the enrollment process, the budget, the target audience, and began to group together common themes and patterns such as. Our competitive analysis provided us with opportunities and new ideas to explore as we began designing ways to implement the GA MIND project onto the site.

As the GA MIND project is the CARE Center’s largest and newest research study, we wanted a website page that reflects the importance of this new research cohort. As we researched various elements for inspiration from the previous studies mentioned, we noticed a few similarities. The Dog Aging Project and Framingham Heart Study had explained in depth what their study looks into, the benefits of participating, as well as what the enrollment process looks like. For us, since we are targeting rural Georgians who may not necessarily trust or understand the importance of this research cohort; we felt the need to include the eligibility and benefits of enrolling, while fully explaining what the GA MIND entails.

Additionally, once we develop an introduction video for the GA MIND project, we will replace the image at the top of the page with the introduction video. We felt this would bring some personal elements to the landing page, such that users will be able to learn about the study with a friendly face. We also created a pop-up that shows when a user first visits the website, encouraging them to check out the research study we built on on the Better CARE page.

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Once we had our general idea of how we were going to launch the research study on the site, it was time to begin creating our promotional materials. Our main goal with creating our promotional materials was to bring our resources to our target market, and emphasize the importance of CARE’s research and resources. This helped us determine the specific kinds of promotion that would most connect with our audience: billboards and social media posts.

When beginning the process of design concepts for billboards, we wanted to ensure that they grabbed the attention of our target market, along with highlighting our call-to-action: Join our GA MIND Project. The first design we created for the CARE Center was specifically centered around the rural Georgians that pride themselves in being bulldog fans. The connection between the reputable institution that the University of Georgia is and the CARE Center will build the foundation of trust that our target market desires, and is aiming to draw more awareness to our GA MIND Project. The other design that we created for the CARE Center focused on the family impact of joining the research at the CARE Center. The imagery pulls at the emotional aspect of brain health, and targets our audience that may not be UGA fans, but has the core family values that many rural Georgians pride themselves in.

From the billboards, we gained inspiration of how to proceed with social media posts and CARE Center’s 2026 social calendar. Our goal for CARE’s social media platforms was to reach caretakers and family members that need support and resources for their loved ones affected with dementia. Because of this, we determined that curating overarching themes for each month of posting would create long term trust and connection with our audience. An example of these themes include self-care, goal-setting, and CARE(ing) for others. As we continue into 2026, we hope to solidify all monthly themes and the collection of posts that go with it.

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Along with our social media posts, one of our other primary objectives was to find ways to both connect with the CARE Center’s primary target audiences and keep them engaged with the center afterwards. Our goal was to reinforce the idea of having the audience enroll and participate in future research studies.

Our team brainstormed some initial “CARE Swag” ideas over the course of several months with the CARE Center team. However, we weren’t sure exactly how we wanted to present and distribute this merchandise in a meaningful way. After a bit more brainstorming, we came up with “CARE Packages”: a tiered CARE merchandise distribution system that audiences can obtain by engaging in CARE Center research initiatives/studies.

While these have not been finalized yet, our hope is to completely finalize all production cost details, narrow down merchandise options, and further organize/structure the different tiers of these packages in early Spring 2026.

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Results

And this concludes Phase 1 of our CARE Center deliverables! Throughout these last few months, we have truly learned so much about web design, UX/UI design, user research, product development, client communication and collaboration, and much more! And although we have worked with a lot of emerging tech these past few months, we’ve also surprisingly been challenged to embrace traditional media. In the age of digital media we’ve had to think outside the box to problem solve ways to reach rural Georgians.

Although we may have not faced any major setbacks, after prototyping some of our pop ups and the GA MIND landing page in Figma, we faced slight challenges when transferring to Wordpress. The current CARE website is hosted on Wordpress, but built using the elementor plugin. We definitely encountered a learning curve with the elementor system and features. Therefore, some components of the website are different than originally intended. Yet, we were able to make a landing page that captures the necessary information and components to fulfill our goals, while remaining consistent with the majority of our prototype.

We also faced minor setbacks in the billboard concepting phase of the project, where we had to adapt and revise multiple rounds of designs to emphasize the CARE Center GA MIND Project’s true call-to-action. Along with this, getting trademark approvals from the University of Georgia was a challenge, one the team learned so much from, now knowing the back end process of design approvals within a trademarked institution.

In the next phase we hope to achieve the following:

1. Complete user testing of our Beta site
2. Website Launch
3. Create Social Media Calendar & Content
4. Record & release our Video Series
5. Press Release
6. Finalize & order Care Package Materials

We are so excited to continue to work with the CARE Center in the upcoming semester and see all that we can achieve with emerging media!