CASE STUDY:
Lifespace Communities
A national employment-brand campaign built around real employee stories.
Employment Brand Campaign / Recruitment / Multi-Location Production
The Need
Lifespace Communities is a not-for-profit senior living organization, based in West Des Moines, Iowa, with multiple communities across the country.
Lifespace was building a new careers website and needed video that showed prospective employees what working inside its communities actually felt like, told by the people already doing the work.
Project Snapshot
What started as a three-market production expanded into a national campaign spanning five markets, ten filming days, and three travel production weeks.
5
Markets
Filming Days
10
Employee Stories
9
Finished Videos
28
Travel-Production Weeks
3
The Challenge
Lifespace wasn't simply trying to fill open positions. The bigger goal was to change how prospective employees thought about working at Lifespace.
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The campaign needed to show the meaningful relationships between team members and residents, while helping Lifespace recruit stronger candidates and keep the people it already had.
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Our challenge was turning that strategy into real stories across multiple communities and markets.
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At the same time, the production had to work within a fixed budget, a compressed travel schedule, and a small crew, without making the finished work feel small.
The Approach
We built the production around a small, experienced crew that could move quickly without losing consistency from one location to the next.
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Rather than treating employees like on-camera talent, we approached the interviews as real conversations. The goal was to create enough comfort and trust for people to speak naturally about their work, their relationships with residents, and what made their community meaningful.
At each location, we balanced interviews with b-roll and environmental footage while working inside active communities. That meant staying flexible, keeping the footprint small, and adapting to what was happening around us. In Chicago, we split the shoot across two half days so we could wrap by 3pm and still make a 7pm flight to Florida.
The same core team traveled throughout the project, helping us maintain a consistent visual language and production process across changing locations, employees, and schedules.
The Turning Point
The first major piece to come out of the project was the employment-brand manifesto film.
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When the rough cut reached the client team, about two weeks after the shoot wrapped, the response was immediate. The agency reported “three very happy clients.” Within days, Lifespace had presented the film internally and gotten the go-ahead for a second round of production.
What began as a tightly scoped first production had earned enough confidence to grow.
The second phase added two new markets and a return to Chicago, six more employee stories, seven more filming days, and a dedicated day for broader community b-roll.
3 → 9 employee stories
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3 → 5 markets
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3 → 10 filming days
“FABULOUS. It's giving 'Chef' Table' vibes with that epic soundtrack. I love it..!!!! LOVE IT. [My] husband just watched it and said, 'I'm now intrigued about careers at your company.' Mission accomplished.”
— Sarah Phillips
Director of Creative
Lifespace
“I am far from a critical eye for things like this…but I think this is wonderful. If this is the rough draft, I can’t wait to see the final version!”
— Debbie Eberenz
Director of Talent
Acquisition
Lifespace
The Final Campaign
By the end of the engagement, Lifespace had a much larger and more flexible content library than originally planned.
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The final campaign included one employment-brand manifesto, nine full-length employee stories, and 30-second and 15-second cutdowns of each story, for 28 finished videos in total.
The work also included still photography, extensive b-roll, and more than 4.5 terabytes of organized raw footage.
The content anchored Lifespace's new careers website, which launched in July 2024.
The Outcome
What began as a three-market production grew into a much larger national campaign.
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The engagement ended before long-term recruitment metrics could be measured. What Lifespace walked away with was a library built to outlast the launch: every story in three lengths, and a footage archive their team can keep drawing from.
“The clients were thrilled about the new light we were shining on their people and culture, and the way we were telling their stories.”
— Eric Harris
Founder, MindHandle
(now Liquid Agency)
Telling stories across multiple communities?
Senior living organizations often have meaningful stories spread across locations, employees, residents, and departments. The challenge is capturing them consistently without turning each community into a large commercial production.
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Sonder Films builds lean, story-driven productions designed to work across multiple locations while keeping the people on camera comfortable and the process manageable.
Let's talk about your next campaign
If you’re looking for emotionally intelligent, authentic storytelling that performs, you’re in the right place.