Secret Rebrands: High-Fives and Pauses - The True Story of Rebranding a Nonprofit
Shhh, it’s still a secret
Last week a local organization with a massively important reach across the region voted to approve a name change and a new brand was born. We have been working with the organization over the last year to study their brand, their stakeholders feelings about it, and recommend a change. Last night the work on audiences, persona, and the resulting name change was affirmed by the full board. Such an amazing moment of celebration and high-fives and yet now we will wait for months as we transfer work over to a graphic design firm to execute a visual image of the new brand.
Our brand work is for nonprofits
While we work with a variety of clients on our strategic planning and change management projects including government, corporate, higher education, start-up, and nonprofits - we have developed a speciality of brand work with nonprofits. Because let’s be honest for once, nonprofits are different and their brand journeys are different and involve more people and decision makers than your typical company.
Such is the work of brand strategy
The celebrations and elation over the changes are often far removed from the visual brand reveals. While we wait for a beautiful visual to accompany the hard work of strategy we thought we would revisit a few of the rebrands that have cycled through the visual stage while we wait for this one to have its debut (and if we are totally honest, the few other ones in motion).
Feed More
The call with the Feed More rebrand from our internal and external research with stakeholders, listening sessions with staff, donor and volunteer surveys was a need to finally complete their decade long merger and claim their role as a caregiver - an organization that collects, prepares, distributes food across our region. The density of their strategy project involved working with an internal brand team and listening deeply to how people described the organization as well as their aspirations in the region. At Feed More, the brand strategy naturally led into a new strategic focus and a clarified vision. We were proud to partner with Campfire & Co. on the rebrand and watch them excel in the visual space while we focused on the internal culture and data to support the rebrand.
Peter Paul
Peter Paul’s simplification from Peter Paul Development Center was born of their 2019 strategic plan - a full integration of Richmond Promise Neighborhood’s focus on authentic community engagement into the culture and process of the organization. Embedding brand strategy into their strategic plan process allowed us to capture deep brand information from stakeholders throughout the process and then turn our attention to the brand once it was completed. This led to a comprehensive community listening session and deep insight from neighbors and parents engaged in the programs. All used to support the refined name and brand.
Why the name change and visual refresh? See, a funny thing happened on the way to developing highly impactful programs in the East End - they were no longer a center - their services spread all over the East End and they were impacting not just children but families, nonprofit partners, neighbors, and schools. Their name needed to be bigger and give them space. So visit Peter Paul and spy their after school academies at the Coleman Promise Center at 1708 N. 22nd Street, or their Promise Centers all over the East End. The visual brand for Peter Paul was executed by MindHatch Creative.
Purely Piedmont
The Rappahannock Rapidan Food Council desired a name and a brand for a regional food campaign. Here we got to work from scratch and meet with key stakeholders to execute a brand survey and digest and iterate on ideas - finally landing on Purely Piedmont. It’s been exciting to watch the Food Council execute on the brand and roll it out with swag, labels, and a website. The fabulous logo here was developed by Polychrome Collective.