What is a community, if not the sum of its stories?
Thus begins the 2011 Annual Report for the Central Carolina Community Foundation. We were thrilled to work with photographer Jeff Amberg and Crowson Stone Printing on this project. Thanks, also, to CCCF’s Tonia Cochran, who wrote the profiles and was equally masterful in managing the project’s many moving parts.
(Turns out it does, in fact, take a village.)
We’ve been busy creating new work for Paradise Valley Estates, a continuing care retirement community in beautiful Northern California just south of Napa Valley. After we conducted several discovery sessions, we developed brand positioning and message strategy. We designed and updated logos and created a fresh new identity package as well as print advertising and a sales collateral system . The campaign emphasizes the fact that residents can enjoy an active and adventurous lifestyle at Paradise Valley Estates. We enlisted the talent of photographer George Fulton, who captured the personality of PVE beautifully. And going live very soon will be a new website by our WECOmates truematter. Thanks to everyone involved on this project!
We all have the opportunity to learn, and the inability to read only affects a few people in the community. It’s really not my issue.
Overcoming this all-too pervasive insight formed the basis of the brand strategy we developed for Kershaw County Literacy Association during CreateAthon. With a staggering 23% illiteracy rate in this area, KCLA needed to bring the issue to the attention of community leaders in a way that would allow them to understand the truth, consequences and imperatives for action behind illiteracy.
So we set about the time-driven task of creating a brand platform for KCLA that could help the organization speak to the impact of illiteracy in very clear and certain terms. Punctuated by a rallying cry targeting community leaders in local business, civic and faith-based organizations.
An important objective was to align KCLA with the strategic work being done in the Midlands through Literacy 2030. Our work is designed to connect KCLA to this regional initiative, while giving them the opportunity to tell their story in a way that is indigenous to Kershaw County.
After 24+ sleep-deprived hours, we joyfully presented a new identity, brand handbook, and presentation targeting community leaders to Paula Scarborough, chairman of the KCLA board. While we felt great about the work our team presented, it was the first tear down her cheek that put a night’s worth of madness into perspective and reminded us of the Great CreateAthon Promise:
Good will come of this.
completed brand handbook
KCLA CreateAthon team: Allison Caldwell, Teresa Coles, Kelly Davis, George Fulton, Michael Powelson, Peyton Rowe.
We recently launched a cross-channel communications plan for Goodwill Industries of the Upstate/Midlands. In order to sustain and grow Goodwill, we recognized the importance of engaging a younger generation of shoppers and donors. We developed a digital strategy to make the brand relevant for modern lifestyles. The foundation of this social strategy is the creation of a thrift-inspired lifestyle and design blog, The Good Life blog.
This isn’t your average corporate blog. In fact, it’s not corporate at all. Goodwill hired an independent blogger to work her design and thrifty magic on finds from Goodwill stores all across the Upstate and Midlands, and then write about them in an interesting and useful way. The blog is targeted to reach a younger, more diverse audience–those consumers who are interested in building a creative and sustainable lifestyle, especially in this post-Recession economy.
We’ve been delighted by the strong show of interest the blog has already received this soon after the launch. This early success just reminds us, once again, that there’s no substitute for great content that proves to be meaningful for consumers’ lives. To read the blog and be inspired yourself, click here.
Creative team: Cathy Monetti, Ryon Edwards, Kathryn White, Kendra Schaefer (thepixellary.com), Kendra Ardis.
We’re pleased to have just launched our first work for The Sunshine House, a national brand of early education centers. The Sunshine House came to us looking for a way to be more competitive in a crowded market. In a landscape that’s cluttered with generic stock photography and interchangeable brand messaging, it’s easy for one childcare development brand to get lost among the rest.
That’s why we walked Sunshine House through our disciplined strategic process to determine a new brand positioning: support for families. The shift in brand messaging from kid-centric to family-focused was designed to differentiate from other childcare development brands and resonate with working parents. The Sunshine Helps program provides real life benefits engineered to help busy working parents—everything from more convenient hours to gift cards for a month of free housecleaning.
Next, we replaced Sunshine House’s enrollment discount program with a Kohl’s retail partnership. Teaming up with Kohl’s helps Sunshine House demonstrate its commitment to supporting families by offering practical incentives that add real value, rather than discounting one of the most important decisions a parent makes (childcare).
We’ve had a blast working on this brand to build a strong community of Sunshine families.
Strategy and creative team: Kevin Smith, Cathy Monetti, Ryon Edwards, Julie Turner, Kathryn White.
Literacy 2030 is an initiative lead by the Central Carolina Community Foundation that unites literacy organizations across the Midlands of South Carolina. With the admittedly aspirational goal of achieving 100 percent literacy in South Carolina by 2030, the organization supports literacy service providers by facilitating member communication, encouraging collaboration and providing access to funding sources.
We loved developing this identity system and branding platform, and we’re hard at work on a website to be launched in mid-September.
Strategy and creative team: Cathy Monetti, Ryon Edwards, Kathryn White, Kendra Schaefer (thepixellary.com)
We recently completed an identity update for New Morning Foundation, an organization that seeks to improve young people’s access to reproductive health education, counseling, and clinical services throughout South Carolina. We were asked to give the existing logo a “facelift” and to redesign existing brand identity collateral.
Why do we “rebrand” anyway? That word and the word “branding” are thrown around quite a bit, but it’s important to remember that the logo is not the “brand.” The brand is all about the customer touchpoints and the experience one has when interacting with the organization — when you boil it all down, the brand is someone’s gut instinct about a company or organization. I remember Marty Neumier stating years ago in a workshop that “the brand” is what OTHERS say it is, not what the company says it is. That statement has stuck with me for years.
And the logo is a small, but very important part of the brand. It must strike the right balance of the rational and the emotional. It must convey the spirit of the organization in a split-second. The cross-sensory experience is the brand, but the logo has to uphold and to support that.
Changes or redesigns could mark an internal cultural shift, a change in business objectives, or change in ownership. Often times, as in the case of New Morning Foundation, it’s a matter of staying relevant and is born from the desire to have visual consistency across mediums. Lay a solid foundation with a strong, meaningful logo, and that will help branding efforts at any level.
Old logo
New logo
New identity package
For the last few months, we’ve been working with New Morning Foundation to launch this year’s virtual legislative advocacy campaign, Bee Day. Today, members in the Tell Them e-advocacy network will swarm the South Carolina Statehouse with emails. Eight thousand members will come together to ask legislators to maintain funding for critical prevention-based family planning services.
The creative team produced an event poster that demonstrates both the spirit of Bee Day and the Tell Them brand: when we stand together, important work is accomplished.
Visit tellthemsc.org to learn more about today’s swarm.
First let me say: Let’s hear it for organizations who continue to believe in the power of the thoughtful annual report. In the wake of annihilated budgets, so few companies commit the dollars to produce them anymore. But I believe there is great value in the process of taking stock of the year that has passed. Where were the successes? The surprises? What are the lessons learned?
We are fortunate to produce several annual reports at RP, including this one (just completed) for the Central Carolina Community Foundation. We thank Tonia Cochran of CCCF and our friends at R.L. Bryan for a wonderful collaborative experience. We are particularly pleased that JoAnn Turnquist, CEO of the foundation, is using the theme “Community Building / Building Community” in her many presentations to community partners and donors.
We believe an annual report is a great opportunity to look back, learn and celebrate. It is also an opportunity to fortify a brand position — an investment smart companies and nonprofits are continuing to make, even in this challenging economy.
The illustration is actually a removable belly band
The reveal
original illustration by Maria Fabrizio Powelson
Community building through engagement
Connecting people who want to make a difference with real community need
Marketing a cause should be an easy sell. There’s a problem, and here’s an organization dedicated to solving it. Act now. Yet it’s not that simple.
In fact, simplicity, and a serious lack of it, is often the problem.
Selling a product is often comparatively easy because it’s so tangible. As marketers, we’re even trained to add dimension by assigning brand attributes and emotion to a product. With regard to causes, this is a trap.
We recently completed a project for Columbia’s Gills Creek Watershed Association. The association wanted a modest increase in its $15 memberships. Being a university town, there’s no shortage of conservation-committed individuals in Columbia. So that task at hand seemed easily obtainable, only we had a few obstacles:
Add to that the fact that the association was targeting environmentalists, developers, anglers, scientists and outdoorsmen on a variety of water-related issues from pollution to sediment. In short, there was message entanglement.
Creative team Lauren Bowles and Jason Corbin did a beautiful job simplifying the message to the most relevant common denominator, clean water. They also overcame budget obstacles by producing a poster for area retailers catering to the conservation-committed. Their work reminds me that if your messaging is not brutally simple, even the most worthwhile endeavors can fail.
