Turning Dementia Awareness into Understanding

Dementia can be difficult to understand until it affects someone personally. For Home Instead, which has extensive experience supporting people living with dementia at home, simply telling people about the condition could only go so far.

The opportunity was to create a different kind of conversation. One that helped people develop a more tangible understanding of some of the challenges experienced by someone living with dementia.

Home Instead’s nationwide franchise network created significant potential to take that conversation directly into local communities. The challenge was to encourage offices to participate and give them the communications support to turn the experience into compelling local activity.

Working with Training 2 CARE, the Home Instead-branded dementia experience bus offered an immersive simulation designed to give participants greater insight into how dementia can affect everyday experiences.

Its nationwide tour created a powerful platform for Home Instead to take dementia education beyond traditional information-led communications and directly into the communities its local offices serve.

As Home Instead’s PR partner, TMC developed the communications approach around the initiative, helping turn each stop on the tour into an opportunity for local engagement, media visibility and conversation.

We created adaptable PR resources that gave offices a strong national narrative while allowing them to make the story relevant to their own communities. This included localised press materials and communications support designed to build awareness, attract media interest and encourage engagement from influential local stakeholders.

TMC also supported media relations around the campaign, securing national broadcast media attendance at Home Instead’s national event and equipping individual offices to build relationships with local press and broadcasters.

This balance of national positioning and local activation was central to the approach. Rather than treating the tour as a series of standalone events, the communications framework enabled Home Instead to use the collective reach of its franchise network to reinforce its dementia expertise at scale.

The tour took Home Instead’s dementia awareness activity into communities across the country, creating opportunities for people to experience the simulation, learn more about dementia and speak directly with local Home Instead teams.

Individual activations also attracted local press and radio interest, alongside attendance from civic and community figures including local mayors.

Crucially, the experience gave Home Instead’s offices a compelling way to begin conversations that extended beyond the activation itself. Teams could build on the experience to share their dementia knowledge, explain the support available to families and strengthen their profile within the communities they serve.

The initiative was subsequently repeated, extending the value of the original campaign and creating further opportunities for offices to engage their local audiences.

The campaign demonstrated the strength of combining Home Instead’s national scale and specialist dementia expertise with the local connections of its franchise network.

An immersive experience provided the catalyst, but the wider value came from turning it into a platform for education, conversation and community engagement.

For TMC, our role was to ensure that communications supported that ambition at every level. Establishing a clear PR narrative nationally, equipping individual offices to activate it locally and creating opportunities for Home Instead’s expertise to reach audiences well beyond those who stepped onto the bus.