A nonprofit in Durham, NC asked Design Kompany for some help with making a website, a brochure, and streamlining these and other marketing materials under a cohesive look.
Here’s what one member of the team said about working with DK:
‘Anyone who’s worked for a startup-stage organization knows that gaining this clarity is far more challenging than one might think. We’ve incorporated the learnings from this exercise into all of communications, and it helps other people get it too. DK stressed that you have to earn your customer’s trust and loyalty. Truly great brands understand this. My favorite part of the process was the fabulous aha that came when we did our customer activity.
‘DK had us name the personality traits of different kind of customers and once we organized these traits into personas, it was as if a veil had been lifted. Suddenly, conceptualizing what we do, the value we bring, and who we work with became clear. Unchanged: My favorite part of the process was the fabulous aha that came when we did our customer activity. DK had us name the personality traits of different kind of customers and once we organized these traits into personas, it was as if a veil had been lifted. Suddenly, conceptualizing what we do, the value we bring, and who we work with became clear.’ —Sarah Kate Fishback, Green Plus, Durham 2010
Messaging value
We met. We listened. We learned. The team was going through some shifts, but they had, at their core, a passionate story about helping business owners find ways to be more ‘green.’ Then, they would certify those who met certain criteria. What was required of us was not a total rebrand, or even a brand identity design, in this case. It was focusing the nonprofit’s messaging.
Rolling up our sleeves, Akira Morita, my partner at DK, and I got started on that task. We were going to head into interviews, we were going to talk to clients and also the members of the team, and we were going to understand, deeply, not superficially, what it was that they could say was their key ‘value proposition.’ In terms that would resonate with the audience. Importantly, we wanted to respect the work already done on this, with the existing brand identity design. Looking over those materials, understanding what it was that was already shared and studied, and presented in the branding package that we got in the form of vector files in Illustrator was a first step. You want to build on where people are, not reinvent the wheel.
All of the audiences had one thing in common: they were pretty no-nonsense. Straightshooters, we knew that the messaging needed to connect with them. That’s where ‘Nuts and bolts of doing green’ came in. See below; this is one side of the brochure, which was a four-panel piece, double-sided. Laid flat, one side looks like this:
