Inside the ‘Canva for Public Health’: Arclet Founder on Creating Tech for Health Communicators

Meet Adrienne Ammerman, founder of Arclet.

Feb 18, 2026

Imagine this. Measles is suddenly spreading in your town. You work at a health department or hospital, and you need to let people know how to protect themselves. But you don’t have the resources to launch a fully developed campaign or hire a marketing agency to create assets. So you have to figure it out yourself.

Time is limited. Bandwidth is stretched. Even with tools like Canva, you are still responsible for designing visuals that resonate with your local audience and messages that make sense for your community. Graphic design tools give you beautiful templates, but the public health strategy? That part is missing. You have to piece it all together quickly…until now.

I’m excited to share an interview I conducted with Adrienne Ammerman, founder of Arclet. Arclet is a tech platform that allows health communicators (or those creating health communication materials) to discover ready-to-use health campaign assets, customize them for their local audiences, share them directly to their channels, and measure their impact. It’s essentially a design, scheduling, and analytic tool built purposely for public health!

Adrienne Ammerman is a social innovation startup founder and health communications practitioner dedicated to empowering health communicators with evidence-based, culturally competent, and measurable health information.
She is the Founder & CEO of Arclet, a national platform that helps local and state health communicators create and share trusted, community-focused messaging. Arclet is a U.S. National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant recipient and an NC IDEA grant awardee, supporting its work in public health technology and communications innovation.
In 2019, in her role at WNC Health Network, Adrienne initiated the creation of a collective impact collaborative that now includes more than 75 health communicators representing public health agencies, hospitals, and community-based partners across the 18 counties of western North Carolina. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she raised more than $1 million to develop a regional communications campaign that strengthened local communicators’ capacity to mitigate the pandemic’s impact. Recognized by the CDC as a model strategy, this approach continues to inform communications efforts for other priority health issues in the region.
Adrienne was a 2023 Information Futures Fellow at Brown University’s School of Public Health. She holds an MA in Communications with a concentration in Health Communication from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Gender & Sexuality from The New School.

Adrienne’s passion for health communication began early in her career while working at a maternal and child health organization in New Delhi. There, she realized she could connect her love for storytelling and creativity with raising awareness about critical health issues. Since then, she has held communications roles across several non-profit and health organizations.

Now, she and the Arclet team are running a social enterprise centered around tech. I spoke with her about Arclet’s origin story, how the platform supports health communicators, and what it’s been like to navigate the tech space.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. All views expressed are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent any affiliation or organization.

Talk to me about Arclet. How did the idea form?

Adrienne: I first got the idea when I attended a national health communications conference. It was before the pandemic. People from the CDC and Google were talking about a multi-million dollar campaign and how well it performed. I sat there thinking about the folks I work with in western North Carolina who didn’t have the resources to boost Facebook posts or create a logo for their health department.

I started to imagine a platform that could leverage technology that was purpose-built for local communicators like the ones I worked with. I assumed someone was already building it. I asked around and the more conversations I had, the more I realized no one was.

So the idea is brewing. How does it materialize?

Adrienne: I was working for a regional public health non-profit organization called WNC Health Network in western North Carolina (WNC). WNC Health Network has done incredible work around collaborative community health improvement across 18 counties. When I started there in 2018, I was inspired by how they brought together community health improvement leads from hospitals and health departments to collaborate, build shared resources, and collect data. I saw a need to do something similar for people in communication roles.

So, I researched who was in communication roles at hospitals and health departments and brought them together. Because we had been meeting consistently, we had built strong relationships. This was essential when the COVID-19 pandemic appeared. We were able to pivot our work into a COVID-19 communications response for our region, which included a collaborative regional COVID-19 campaign called “My Reason WNC.”

We braided together funding to adapt CDC and state messaging to feature local people, updated images to show mountains, and adjusted language. We created a Google Sheet to organize us, which was essentially a scrappy version of what would later become Arclet.

Each county had a spreadsheet where they could select which messages and calls-to-action they wanted. We worked with a marketing agency who helped apply local branding and set up ads. We developed shared performance measures to evaluate what was working.

And it was successful. We demonstrated a desire to collaborate as long as local autonomy was intact. Even rural communities were engaging with the content.

That period of work is what I’m most proud of. It applied everything I’d learned about health communications, but in a collaborative way. It was led by people on the front lines, in health departments, and in community organizations.

Collaboration was key for your COVID work. You now have a Google Sheet version of Arclet. What happens next?

Adrienne: I saw the impact of individuals coming together. We felt more supported, had greater capacity, and greater confidence in our ability to do this work. Our WNC Health Communicators Collaborative came out of the pandemic feeling supported and stronger. That gave me a real desire to scale this kind of support for the broader field. However, the model itself was resource-intensive and therefore hard to sustain.

That’s when I applied for the Information Futures Fellowship at Brown University and pitched this idea. I worked on a prototype design, action plan, and funding strategy for a scalable health communications platform that can be adapted to meet health communicators’ needs. I tested several key platform concepts on real-world health communications, including the customization of existing messaging and materials, mechanisms for local tailoring and branding, support for digital ad placement, and shared tracking of performance measures to guide and refine communications strategies.

That fellowship was the validation I needed after years of feeling like, “Is there something wrong with me that I can’t let go of this idea?” That was three years ago.

The design is now underway, yet the tech still needs to be built. As a public health professional, how did you bring it to life?

Adrienne: It’s been such a journey as a public health practitioner to build a tech tool from scratch.

At first, development agencies told me it would cost $600,000 to $1.5 million to build. Eventually, I found a team who could build a MVP for $25,000. The MVP or minimum viable product is the scrappiest version of the product you can make to start testing whether it is something people want.

I thought, okay I don’t need to find $1.5 million. I just need to find $25,000 to build this. It doesn’t have to be a beautiful thing. It just needs to serve as proof of concept beyond this Google Sheet. It took me a really long time to find funding though.

Finally, I was at a great summit on health communication hosted by RTI. By the end, I stood up during a Q&A and said, “I work with this collaborative. We have this idea of how we want to build a tool to help communicators more consistently share credible, engaging, culturally-relevant health information that will cut through some of the noise. This is how we can address health misinformation, but I need money to build this tool.”

A program officer from Burroughs Wellcome Fund was in the audience. Afterwards, she gave me her card, and that turned into my first grant. I received just enough money to start building the MVP.

Even before we started building the tech, I had been talking about Arclet. I had a poster at a health communications conference. People started signing up for a wait list. All of these people were state and local health communicators across the country. They became my beta testers, trying out early versions of the platform and giving feedback. That continues to be an ongoing process. We’re constantly evolving as our number of users has grown and the amount of feedback we get grows.

What can health communicators do on Arclet?

Adrienne: So Arclet is a platform that helps trusted messengers find, adapt, share, and measure evidence-based health information, so communities receive clear, timely guidance. It includes a library of vetted public health messaging assets and templates. We currently have around 1,500 assets across 100 public health topics.

We want people sharing health messaging in their communities to feel supported. There are currently 70 content creators for the platform, including associations like the American Diabetes Association and state health agencies like the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). For example, we uploaded over 100 editable measles assets in English and Spanish from the North Carolina DHHS. They allowed us to make those assets editable so health communicators outside North Carolina can add their own logo and use them locally.

There is a real desire in public health to share. During the pandemic, organizations wanted to share campaigns and infographics, but there wasn’t an easy way to do it at scale. Websites just became long lists of PDFs and resources. With Arclet, everything is in one place. Users can search for assets, edit them (when permitted), add local branding, and localize captions.

They can also create reviewer groups for community feedback, build and share toolkits with partners (no login required), schedule posts directly to social platforms, and view analytics dashboards. We’re trying to facilitate collaboration so communities don’t have to recreate the wheel.

We want to evaluate what messaging works in real time and use that data to improve practice. In Arclet, analytics are clean and easy to filter, which is helpful for health directors, grant reporting, and accreditation. We aim to replace generic marketing tools with something purpose-built for public health.

As a public health tech company, how are you thinking about AI?

Adrienne: In 2024, we received a National Science Foundation grant that supported some of our AI work. It allowed us to co-design Arli, our health communications co-pilot.

It is trained on health communication best practices such as the CDC inclusive language guide, case studies, and messaging dos and don’ts, as well as interviews we conducted with communicators, community health workers, and experts.

Right now, Arli is integrated into the editor. When a user selects messaging, they can tell Arli who they are trying to reach. Arli analyzes the image and caption and provides suggestions for adapting the creative and language. It also includes citations for its feedback.

Our vision is for Arli to become further integrated into the system. We’ve gotten great feedback so far. Not everyone is ready or allowed to use AI, so we’ve designed Arli intentionally. It’s opt-in. Users always know when they are using it. It encourages human feedback through built-in review loops.

In public health, we can’t just talk about AI. We have to engage with it, experiment, evaluate real-world use, and advocate for how it should be developed and regulated.

Tech is a new frontier for many health communicators. What advice do you have for those interested in tech?

Adrienne: First, you don’t need tech to start. In some ways, I’m grateful we built the early model with Google Sheets. It clarified our core functionality before building tech.

Second, building tech is now more accessible than before. Look for hackathons in your community. Pitch your idea. Find people who want to experiment.

Third, don’t think you need a tech background, millions of dollars, or a PhD to build something helpful. If your idea has been validated by the people you work with, just try it.

I see Arclet as an experiment. At the end of the day, we are seeing what we can build. We’re seeing how far we can take it. We’re seeing if people want it. We’re seeing if they’ll help support us move it forward. We’re committed to moving the public health field forward and sharing our journey along the way.

Interested in Arclet?

After speaking with Adrienne, she mentioned that anyone can start a one-month free trial of Arclet. Once your trial ends, you can select a pricing plan that fits your organization’s needs. Committed to equitable access, she mentioned that Arclet also offers support through the Arclet Access Fund, which provides select partners with a full year of free access if cost is a barrier.