The wrong experience
at the wrong moment
costs more than you think
In Healthcare: demand, uptake, adherence, outcomes
In life: trust, dignity, the willingness to try again
These are threshold opportunities many organizations fumble — and the moments I've spent 25 years designing for.
Hi, I'm Manya Dotson — a creative strategist and behavioral designer in search of gorgeously sticky human problems.
I specialize in turning avoidance into approach, discomfort into delight, and transition into transformation — using a science-backed framework:
Health · Hospitality · Harmony™
How can I help?
Strategic Consulting and Creative Strategy
For health organizations, mission-driven brands, and leaders whose work turns on sensitive moments. Humanity-centered design + Behavioral science + Relational Architecture™. 25 years of pattern recognition applied to the hardest human moments.
Your work is sound and your mission is real. Something is still breaking between you and the people you most need to reach.
Elixir Artifacts
Designed to delight your senses and shift your state — our created and curated kits, talismans, and objects of mischief are invitations to pause, smile, and reconnect. Each one is built on the same behavioral science and relational intelligence as the consulting work; translated into something you can hold in your hands.
Starting with the Emergency First Moon Kit™ — because every girl deserves to have the moment she gets her first period designed for her.
Portable portals for moments that matter
The Elixir Approach
People get frozen in fear and shame. They move when they feel well, welcomed, and genuinely connected to the work, the mission, and each other.
Health creates steadiness. Hospitality creates trust and delight. Harmony creates the conditions where collaboration and courage rise naturally.
Experience is strategy. Beauty is operational. Connection is a growth driver.
Elixir designs the conditions — cultural, sensory, relational — where people show up fully, and brands earn the trust they're asking for.
This is the work, at every scale.
Health · Hospitality · Harmony™
About Me
Hi. I'm a creative strategist and behavioral designer who has spent 25 years designing and marketing healthcare products and services in some of the toughest markets in the world.
In Nigeria, I led a campaign that stopped asking men to prove they were responsible enough to test for HIV — and instead made testing an act of courage that validated the man they already were. Eighty percent of men who tested in places the campaign ran cited VALOR as their reason for walking through the door.
In Kenya, I led the launch of a water treatment brand that normalized adding bleach to drinking water — a substance most people considered poison — and within eighteen months it was being used in more than 35% of Kenyan households.
In Bangladesh, I supported the government in redesigning vaccination services to reach babies who had never received a single vaccine — families the system had never touched.
Three examples from 25 years of work across 25+ countries. The same insight every time: people don't avoid things because they don't care. They avoid them because the experience, message, or system hasn't been designed to meet them where they are.
That's the work. At every scale.
Trusted by: WHO · USAID · Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation · Jhpiego · PSI · Merck · AstraZeneca · Pfizer · US Dept. of Defense