BY TONY FONTANA
As an experienced marketer, Ashley Roberts understands it’s best to be at the head of the pack and set the pace for the competition to follow. She also knows a company’s brand is often the engine to do just that. Ashley joined SafeRide Health in March 2022 on the heels of seven years of rapid growth for the company. One of her first key initiatives was to lead an evolution of the brand. Later that year, we began collaborating with Ashley on a rebranding of the company’s identity and website.
“The time to engage Hencove was right because our team knew the SafeRide brand had tremendous opportunity to advance and mature,” she told us. “Shifts in the market and regulatory landscape demanded it.”
Non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) is a benefit available to Medicaid and Medicare Advantage (MA) members. As an NEMT broker bridging partnerships between health plans, NEMT companies, and care providers, SafeRide offers a technology-enabled approach to ride fulfillment and data transparency that stands out among others in the industry, which have a reputation for being slow in sharing key metrics like ride performance and member experience. It was time for SafeRide’s brand identity and narrative to catch up to its industry-leading technology and pacesetting, patient-centric model.
We spoke with Ashley shortly after we wrapped up the rebrand and new website launch to hear about her experience working with Hencove, what she learned from the process, and what’s next for SafeRide.
Tony: Set the stage for us. What made it the right time to refresh SafeRide’s brand, visual identity, and website? What factors drove you to this decision?
Ashley: SafeRide has been around for almost 10 years, and when I joined the company our leadership team reached a consensus. We understood that we needed to be clearer and more resonant about the many ways we enable our customers (health plans, NEMT providers, and care providers) to move patients and members to life-sustaining care, reduce care costs and waste, and transform healthcare. As we grew into new markets and strengthened existing partnerships, it came time to reimagine how our brand could demonstrate our impact and influence in every aspect of the member’s journey to care. We wanted our brand to be a bigger, bolder platform for the stories behind our technology and the people who inspire it.
To achieve this, we knew we needed to revamp the SafeRide brand from the inside-out, both visually and narratively. This meant aligning on three new pillars that we would center the new brand on—from our internal culture to the website and brand story, all the way to our call center to guide the ways we interact with members and partners. As it turned out, the new brand pillars, Access, Visibility, and Efficiency, really resonated not only with our senior leadership team but also across our product, operations, transportation, growth, and customer- and member-facing teams. These brand pillars have become a North Star internally, and before that, in our work with the Hencove team aligning on the vision for our new brand identity.
Tony: When the rubber hit the road, how did our team partner with yours to reimagine your brand’s identity and story? What were some of your aha moments or interesting takeaways from our strategy sessions?
Ashley: The Hencove team was a partner in the truest sense of the word, guiding us on the journey of really understanding the market landscape while also helping us do some soul-searching about what we wanted to hold on to from our origin story. Working with Hencove on this reflective aspect of refreshing our brand was much more fun than I expected—especially coming up with all the transportation-related puns!
When it comes to companies in our space talking about or showing what they do, healthcare transportation, and NEMT especially, tends to be very traditional or cookie-cutter. The new brand pillars and narrative aspect of the rebrand helped us reframe how we talk about our impact by using more member-centric language. Visually, we wanted to break the industry mold with a vibrant and exciting brand.
On the SafeRide blog, we wrote about the wayfinding aspects of our new logo and brand identity, which has been one of my favorite results of this project; for example, wayfinding makes transit easier and more intuitive, and SafeRide lowers barriers by connecting patients to life-sustaining healthcare at the right time through NEMT. The line and endpoint motif that expands and contracts from the word “Health” is the navigational element of our brand identity coming to life.
Looking back, there were so many lightbulb moments along the way, and through it all, Hencove helped us find thoughtful ways to push boundaries of the brand. This mindset will also guide us in how we think about our content marketing moving forward.
Tony: We moved quickly from the Strategy & Positioning + Branding & Identity phase to website development. How did Hencove help you achieve your vision for SafeRide’s new digital front door?
Ashley: Our customizable platform and industry-leading technology go beyond how NEMT brokers typically operate. When it came to reimagining our website, we wanted it to lead with this value proposition and emphasize the ways we differentiate ourselves. Hencove encouraged us to bring this differentiation mentality to our main website navigation—presenting what makes us unique, rather than being solution or technology focused like most company websites are—and to build the website around those differentiators from the top down.
We were very excited by this approach and how it puts member centricity front and center alongside our customizable platform and solutions, digitized and connected NEMT network of transportation partners, and real-time insights in all phases of the NEMT journey. Simultaneously, Hencove helped us streamline and improve our technology platform and portal login experience for our core audiences (including health plan members, transportation supplier partners, and beyond) in ways we hadn’t before, which was a big priority for us in this project.
Like all great rebrands, our website has more dynamic or interactive elements that showcase what we do best. It’s one thing to write about what we do, but a little animation really takes our brand to the next level, especially with a transportation-focused company like ours. At the same time, Hencove built and designed the website with accessibility in mind, making sure we met Americans with Disabilities Act compliance standards such as high-contrast text and color combinations, more accessible forms, and mouse-only navigation.
Tony: How was the big reveal received by the SafeRide team and your clients/partners?
Ashley: The initial reaction from our health plan, transportation, and care provider partners was that our message was easy to understand and clearly connected to the members we serve. The new brand has been embraced culturally too. When we have all-hands meetings, we ask team members to volunteer to share interactions with members who relate to our brand values—these discussions are often very meaningful highlights of these meetings.
Tony: What early impact has the rebrand had at SafeRide?
Ashley: In addition to the positive feedback we’ve heard, early website engagement metrics have shown a significant uptick in traffic along with visitors staying longer on the website and visiting more web pages compared to before the rebrand. We launched the new brand not too long ago, so we’ll continue to keep track, but the early results are positive. When you put the initial website data and anecdotal feedback together, I think it points to how important it is to distill what we do and the impact we have in more relatable, human terms.
Tony: With the rebrand in the rearview mirror, what’s next for SafeRide?
Ashley: Access to reliable transportation is far from guaranteed for millions of patients, and because of that we never stop thinking about how we can move the poor and sick to better health. The new brand will be our engine as we look to expand our footprint, innovate and improve our technology, and be a driving force in healthcare transformation.