SFU School of Medicine
Doctor’s orders: Launching the first new medical school in western Canada in 50 years.
What we did
Sub-Brand Strategy, Public Awareness Campaign, Photo & Video Production
BC's new School of Medicine at SFU.
When Simon Fraser University set out to establish the first new medical school in Western Canada in over fifty years, the challenge extended far beyond curriculum design. The SFU School of Medicine represented a fundamental disruption to how medicine is taught, who gets to study it, and what relationship a medical school owes to the communities it serves. The institution would need to navigate accreditation constraints, organized internal opposition, complex government relations, and the demands of authentic Indigenous and community partnership — all while building the communications infrastructure needed to launch a program of national significance.
Creating the conditions for candid conversation, and helping an institution figure out what it actually believed before deciding what it would say.
Wiseblood began the engagement in 2023, working directly with founding and interim leadership — including Dean David Price — to diagnose the communications environment before a single message was sent. Through structured discovery sessions with senior leadership, faculty, and partner organizations, we surfaced the organizing tensions that would define the challenge: an institution committed to radical transparency operating under accreditation-imposed constraints; a program positioned on community partnership that needed to resist the appearance of lowering standards; and an Indigenous partnership so foundational it could not be reduced to messaging without becoming tokenism.
From those findings, we designed and delivered a community consultation and engagement process across three Fraser Salish region communities — Surrey, Abbotsford, and Hope — in collaboration with the First Nations Health Authority and Fraser Health Authority. The sessions, structured to listen as much as inform, produced a findings report that validated the school’s community-embedded model and surfaced the specific health priorities that would shape curriculum and storytelling alike.
The community sessions weren't a milestone to check off. They were the primary intelligence source for everything that followed — brand, messaging, admissions, video.
That intelligence became the foundation for everything that followed: a comprehensive brand and communications strategy built around a three-dimensional trust framework; a voice and tone system grounded in leadership discovery; an admissions messaging framework designed to defend the school’s equity-informed approach against organized opposition; a social media strategy, PR and media relations plan, and crisis communication protocols ready for the moment accreditation approval arrives. We also led brand identity development, supported website development, and — most recently — produced the school’s brand and admissions video, now in final review ahead of launch.
Complex projects don't run smoothly by accident; they run smoothly when someone is holding the strategic thread across every decision point.
Three years in, the SFU School of Medicine has the communications infrastructure, the brand coherence, and the strategic positioning to launch a program that will reshape primary care in British Columbia.
