University of California, Davis

Dr. Rosane Oliveira founded UC Davis Integrative Medicine and had spent years coaching people onto a plant-based diet. Her flagship programme, Bite-Sized, used plant-based nutrition as the spine, but it was really about habit change, one small piece at a time.

She wanted to rethink what university online education could be, for adults from outside the university, each with their own reason to change how they lived.

A course site couldn’t hold that: people change habits alongside other people, with something keeping score, not because a video told them to.

First we rebuilt the words for Bite-Sized and UC Davis Integrative Medicine. Our copywriter ran both through the StoryBrand framework, which makes the customer the hero and the brand the guide: a real reorientation for a university, built to be the authority in the room.

To be clear about scope: this was messaging, positioning, and brand strategy, not a new logo or visual identity.

That work surfaced a distinction that shaped everything downstream. Weight loss was what got people through the door; habit change was what they actually came for. So weight loss stayed in the promise (it’s honest, and it’s what people search for), while the programme underneath delivered self-mastery.

From there the positioning got specific:

• A promise a real person could picture: look and feel lighter by getting hold of your emotional eating triggers, learning the science, learning to cook, and being surrounded by people who won’t judge you.
• Differentiators against the real alternatives: a team of expert voices instead of one, accountability tools instead of videos that end, real conversation instead of a one-way webinar, and university-grade evidence behind it all.
• A framing of change itself (environment, then behaviour, then skills, then beliefs, then identity), with a single job at the centre: replace “I’m stuck here, permanently” with “I can make change.”

That last line is the whole product in nine words; once it existed, the challenges, tracker, badges, and community all had something to be for.

We rebuilt the programme as a real membership community: WordPress with BuddyBoss underneath and a lot of custom development on top.

• Challenges became first-class, each with its own community group, so no one attempted a 66-day habit change alone.
• Community sat at the centre, not off to one side: conversations, member profiles, contributions, and finding other members by where they lived.
• The learning journey got structured: a clear path through the curriculum instead of a video library to wade through.
• Live sessions became events with real-time chat, so a weekly broadcast felt like a room rather than a recording.

Three builds did most of the work of turning a course into a practice.

The Challenge Tracker

Members set a goal, picked a start date, and wrote down why. The system calculated the finish, sent encouragement from an “accountability partner” at the one-third, two-thirds, and final stretch, and closed with a reflection (what did I learn about myself?) saved permanently to their profile.

The engagement layer

Points (“seeds”) for the small acts that keep a community alive, badges for finishing what you started, and ranks earned over months rather than minutes. Completed challenges showed as a count on each member’s avatar.

A searchable video library

Years of Rosane’s weekly livestreams were transcribed and indexed, so members could search the archive and land on the moment that answered their question. We built it well before AI made that kind of search ordinary, and members noticed it most.

A membership only works if people keep arriving, so we built the path in:

• Free challenges as the front door: the 21-Day Plant-Based Challenge, plus shorter five- and ten-day runs that led toward the higher-ticket programmes.
• A diagnostic quiz that helped people name what was driving their eating (anxiety, boredom, loneliness, or shame) and showed them where they were stuck instead of just selling to them.
• Paid acquisition on Facebook, with disciplined split testing and tight targeting instead of spray-and-pray spend.
• Automation in Keap: evergreen lead-magnet campaigns and webinars, weekly broadcasts, and the ecommerce plumbing behind recurring membership billing.

The 21-Day Challenge alone added more than 21,000 people to the email list.

When we arrived, the business had no tag manager, no analytics, and no conversion tracking. Every marketing decision ran on instinct.

We installed the measurement layer end to end: tag management, analytics, conversion tracking at every signup and purchase point, and monthly reporting that tied spend to outcomes. For the first time, Rosane could see which campaigns earned their keep.

Across the engagement: 41,000 online challenge registrations, 1,420 active members acquired, and five course launches delivered with every project timeline met.