Project Spotlight: Hygeia Wellness Park
By Yashaswi Sunkara, University of Virginia
Client Overview
Over the course of the past semester, our chapter at UVA has experienced immense growth with its founding, member recruitment, and client projects. One of the clients we had the wonderful opportunity of working with is Hygeia Wellness Park, a mental health/wellbeing company aimed at developing in-person, and online courses where individuals can join classes to learn various skills. These skills are derived from what Hygeia calls “The Wellness Wheel” (shown below).
Their co-founders have an extensive background within this industry with over 90 years of combined experience in the mental health/clinical space. We got in contact through a UVA Health contact to see how best we can help their division. Since we are the Insights division, our new team’s goal was to use this opportunity to employ various research strategies and provide actionable, detailed research.
The mental health crisis has become a global concern in recent years, with rising rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout. Hygeia Wellness Park positions itself as a solution, offering skill-based interventions and accessible courses to bridge gaps in mental health resources.
Project Scope
Our team had decided to work to conduct a dual research effort:
Market Research: To explore the broader mental health landscape and identify emerging trends, competition, and opportunities.
Company Research: To analyze Hygeia’s current partnerships, marketing strategies, and the current situations or more specific problems they wanted to work on
Initially, the focus was on creating a broad research consensus to inform Hygeia’s strategy. However, following the midterm presentation, Hygeia requested actionable recommendations in areas such as:
Course Pricing: Developing a framework to price their wellness courses competitively.
Marketing Strategies: Identifying innovative, cost-effective methods to reach their target audience.
Nonprofit Transition: Evaluating the benefits of transitioning to a nonprofit model, including grant eligibility and tax advantages.
Our success metrics included providing a comprehensive insights report, highlighting actionable advice for pricing strategies and marketing initiatives, and equipping Hygeia with the tools to strategically position itself for growth.
Project Analysis
The team faced two primary challenges. The first was how broad of an area we had to work with. Given the wide array of focus areas, narrowing down actionable insights required balancing depth and distribution of content areas. The team prioritized high-impact recommendations tailored to Hygeia’s immediate needs through weekly calls and consistent communication with each of their team members. An important point to mention is how amazing and dedicated Hygeia’s team was to working with us, as all our interactions were always clear and prompt. Another challenge was the limited data on similar nonprofit mental health organizations posed difficulties in benchmarking course pricing. We had to conduct comparative research across for-profit and nonprofit entities to identify what type of model worked most effectively in this space.
Looking to the future, Hygeia Wellness Park is well-positioned to expand its impact by leveraging the actionable insights from this collaboration. The client plans to pilot the pricing model for upcoming courses (for both consumers and producers) and refine their marketing strategies based on the recommendations provided. Our team learned a tremendous amount and each and all of the insight fellows delivered strategic value for an amazing cause. We will continue to work with Hygeia Wellness Park in the spring of 2025, and we are eager to see how we can further help them grow!
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