Document Design

Maternal Health

Industry

Medical

Duration

5 days

Country

USA

The Challenge

What the client provided

Pacify and Seven Starling had a joint white paper that could reframe how insurance leaders think about maternal mental health, backed by peer-reviewed research and their own outcomes data. But the document was still a content brief: raw text and references organized in a spreadsheet-style table, with "possible graphics" noted in a column that was mostly empty. The argument was strong enough to shift policy decisions, but the format it lived in couldn't get past a first glance.

Dots Solution

United two brands in one voice

A co-branded document can easily look like a committee project. Every page carries both the Pacify and Seven Starling identities without competing for attention, so when this lands on a payer's desk it reads as a unified position from two credible partners, not a document designed by compromise.

United two brands in one voice

Let the crisis speak in numbers

The original draft buried statistics like "1 in 5 women experience clinical postpartum depression" inside paragraphs of body copy. We gave every critical data point its own visual moment, so a reader scanning the document encounters the scale of the problem before they encounter a single paragraph of explanation.

Let the crisis speak in numbers

Showed disparity without reducing it

Racial disparities in maternal mental health are central to this paper's argument. The data pages present side-by-side comparisons across demographics in a way that makes the gaps immediately visible and viscerally clear, while the photography and illustration throughout centers the communities most affected. The result is a document that feels like advocacy, not just analysis.

Showed disparity without reducing it

Built a path from problem to ROI

The original content moved from clinical research to a conclusion without a clear business case in between. We structured the final pages around the economics, leading with Oregon's $91 million in savings and the $14 billion national cost burden, so a payer executive finishes the document thinking about return on investment, not just the moral argument.

Built a path from problem to ROI

The Results

What we have designed

The white paper now functions as a joint sales tool that neither Pacify nor Seven Starling could have produced alone. It takes a 16-page argument spanning clinical research, racial equity data, and health economics and makes each section scannable enough for a benefits director working through a stack of vendor materials. The co-branded format positions both companies as thought leaders in integrated maternal mental health care, which matters when the conversation moves from "should we cover this" to "who should we partner with." Every page is sourced, every claim is cited, and the design makes the evidence feel as urgent as it actually is. It's now the kind of document that earns a second meeting.