A local charity offering advice to hard to reach people needs a new communications strategy and brand identity
Signposts is an organisation that "works to empower the community" by developing and delivering a range of targeted services that are accessible and affordable to everyone. The services we develop aim to address the needs of the most disadvantaged and hard to reach people within their communities. The projects we deliver are diverse and creative, and are often delivered in partnership with other organisations.
After 18 years Signposts has significantly downsized and needs to re-brand.
The challenge
- Create a working brand identity, including: logo, colour scheme, print assets, and copy that explains clearly what signposts do and how they do it.
- Find and/or create a collection of appropriate photographic images for use on the website* and in print materials.
- Improve our use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to market our activity.
- Advice and help with setting up IT based solutions to make Signposts’ administrative work less time consuming and more efficient.
- Signposts are about to build a Wordpress website. They have funding for this, so it isn’t something that we’ll need to tackle at the event. However, anything that might give their website project a kick-start, or help them make the most of their budget would be useful.
Any help or advice on linking this with social media activity would also be helpful.
You can make a start on this challenge simply by contributing ideas, or get stuck right in and share your work with the community here. Login or join the movement to get started!
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Recruit an army of professional volunteers that can add value to your blogging, social media posting, digital projects. Look for work experience fairs at local Universities.
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I have recruited many volunteers through University Recruitment Fairs. Students are often looking where they can complete 100 hours of their time and they have experience behind them. Offer opportunities which can be part of your growth and development. Alex Newton, a Psychology Student at Newman University spent his 100 hours developing our Inspire Art pages for our artists within our charity. He lead the project through to completion.
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Apply to be one of our early adopters to gain sustainable fundraising?
https://dignityplatform.typeform.com/to/YhluFM
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I can produce professional images for you? and help advise you on the website?
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Use WIX to build the website yourself? Its very easy and much cheaper than paying someone to do it?
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I agree with Gwen and Charlene about getting the messaging right form the outset - if they are based near Preston then they should approach the PR undergraduates course in the University of Central Lancashire. They're always looking for case studies etc for their students to get their teeth into and it would be a good way of building social networking followers in the local area at the same time.
In the same way, for images, why not run an Instagram competition? I know a few of the London Instagrammers and they're mostly unpaid and happy to give their photos to charities in return for a credit. The networks elsewhere in the country are smaller but if you ran two # competitions, one for the area and one for signposts generally then I'm sure you'd find some useful material, even if it's just inspiration for the brand refresh.
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" works to empower the community " is really strong as a deliverable and this should stand out on your homepage.
I second what Charlene mentioned below about grouping some key areas.
about brand identity, list what you want to be known for, what you want to focus on and maybe also do a mood board about what signposts, this will also help you thinking about visuals/ picture you want to include. for Pictures, if you can use some from the charity this is easier ( I am not an expert in copyrights).
All this will help when building your website and find a Theme that works for you in worldpress. You may also want to look at other charities that inspire you as an organisation and also your competition to think about what you want as Identity and event website framework.
if you use worldpress you'll be able to link with FB and Twitter very easily.
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From the current website, it looks like Signposts offers a wide range of services -- that can appear a bit scattered at first. Can the services offered be divided into 5-6 areas, and each area assigned a different shape, that is, an arrow of a particular proportion and colour, on the signpost? Is Family Support a short-bodied, wide-headed red arrow? Youth services a long, narrow-bodied green arrow? The corresponding colour and arrow shape could be consistently used across all communications.
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The biggest challenge branding something like this is making sure the charity have the skills internally to properly make use of it. Without the need to get a designer involved every time they need to produce anything.
Macmillans branding is a perfect example of this. The bespoke typeface allows anyone to instantly create their own Macmillan poster.
http://be.macmillan.org.uk/be/default.aspx
For the website, having a clear idea of what the charity wants to achieve online is a great idea. Creating some audience profiles about who they're online users are and what they'd want from Signposts is a good starting point for a digital strategy and something that is easily achievable independently.
More practically, having all the brand identity stuff sorted and having all the content they'd like to have on the website right now and in the near future will avoid wasted design time.
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Might be a bit too obvious, but couldn ask your users to give you examples of signs they've seen that they really like/have an effect on them (drawings, photos, descriptions etc) and use these as inspiration for a new identity for the types of services delivered now and in the future?
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A great - very inexpensive and simple - way to get going with a wordpress site is by using their hosted service at http://wordpress.com/
The free offering is a good place to start, but you may opt for some premium upgrades (http://en.support.wordpress.com/upgrades/) for custom domains and the likes.
