Through the thoughtful development and integration of brand strategy, design, content, and web—and the application of all four areas of expertise to our nonprofit clients’ fundraising efforts—we ensure all your communications achieve two goals: generate desired tactical results and work hard to build the meaning and stature of your brand.

Every engagement, large or small, starts with strategy. We help you to define your audiences—and what they need to think and do to act in your favor. We collaboratively evolve defining attributes, key concepts, what you promise—and why anyone should care. For organizations engaged in multiple endeavors, we craft rational brand architectures to ensure you “get credit” for all your efforts, while giving each line of business its needed visibility.

• Qualitative / quantitative research
• Internal / competitive audits
• Brand architecture / relationships
• Defining attributes
• Naming / nomenclature systems
• Brand promise / positioning
• Key storylines / concepts
• Strategic and creative briefs
• Communications planning
• Rollout consulting
• Documentation and training
• Board and staff workshops

We look at design systemically: informed by brand strategy, choices around your identifier* (symbol / wordmark), color palette, typefaces, imagery, design gestures, and compositional structures come together to create a tool box for visual expression. This toolbox enables you to both create recognizable communications across media and tune each for specific audiences, initiatives, and opportunities—all the while building brand recognition. Today, design is messaging—and it needs to invite people in.

*If you’d like a quick tour of brand identifiers we’ve created, click here.

• Identifier / logo
• Visual systems: color, type, imagery, gesture, composition
• Photography / illustration / art direction
• Print collateral design
• Environmental design
• Web design / user interface
• Training and documentation
• Ongoing design support and consultation

Your words and images need to do much more than “tell.” They need to show, prove, and engage—to communicate “with,” not “at.” They have to live your brand storylines and attributes. We craft multilevel messaging frameworks, develop social media strategies, and provide editorial consulting and writing for print and digital projects. We also train communicators to write for the web, including best practices around voice, accessibility, and content governance.

• Messaging frameworks
• Naming / nomenclature systems
• Content strategy
• Copy for print / web
• Campaign cases
• Advertising / marketing campaigns
• Fundraising materials
• Editorial consulting + ongoing support
• Social media strategy
• Brand and web style guides
• Training

Each website project is an opportunity for you to present an engaging, differentiating, functional, and user-focused experience—one that helps you connect with new constituents, deepen relationships, and achieve your organizational goals. Our process includes in-depth discovery, IA / UX strategy, content strategy and development, design, development, and training. We bring particular expertise in WordPress and we partner with other developers to execute on additional platforms, such as Tessitura.

• Research / discovery
• IA / UX strategy and design
• Prototyping and user-testing
• User interface design
• Responsive HTML / CSS
• CMS development
• Analytics / SEO strategy
• Social media strategy
• Documentation and training

We have always had a large nonprofit practice—colleges and universities, independent schools, orchestras and opera companies, museums, civic and community organizations—and for these clients keeping contributed income streams healthy is critical. We work with clients to identify resonant “ways in” for prospective donors and to devise annual, capital, and comprehensive campaign strategies. We write, design, and produce communications that meet prospective donors where they are, move people closer, and enable staff and board to be more comfortable, fluent, effective fundraisers.

• Qualitative research
• Campaign strategy / naming
• Collaboration with fundraising consultants 
• Identifying “ways in” for donors
• Message development
• Architecture of fundraising communications
• Visual design / campaign identifiers
• Creation of print and digital materials
• Annual, capital, and comprehensive campaigns
• Board and staff training