Something about our interactions with the Safe Horizon team on the RFP informational call made us believe that they believed our small shop could clarify their complex and crucial brand. We understood that their potential clients’ lives depended on understanding and trusting the organization at face value. We felt the tensions inherent in being a massive paragovernmental organization providing client-centered, trauma-informed direct services to diverse people who have recently suffered great harms. We calculated the complications of being antiracist, pro-women, pro-queer, and pro-trans yet interfacing productively with law enforcement, the courts, and agents of community control.
We, definite underdogs, believed they saw all this and trusted how seriously we would take rebranding the largest victims services organization in America, and we were right: shocked, grateful, but not exactly surprised that they selected us and our web design and development partner, ThinkShout, over a stacked field.
Approach This was about voices and information. When an organization addresses such existential harms in such a diversity of ways — and there aren’t that many organizations that do — you need perspectives, experiences that speak to the work from all sides. So we set out on a deep stakeholder research project, with interviews, group discussions and workshops, site visits, internal and external surveys, desk research, a deep landscape review, and more. We developed our findings and recommendations, presented them, and revised toward positioning and brand DNA.
With stakeholder buyin, we embarked on the critical arts of designing visual and verbal identities and crafting messaging. Through rounds of feedback, testing, and iteration we landed on a vital look. And connecting gut, heart, and mind to what we saw and heard in the world, found the new brand idea: Safety Is a Human Right.
In the process, we designed their new website’s information architecture and taxonomy, wrote the main copy for their website and had it translated into Spanish by a subject-matter expert, and flew their favorite photographer in from Berlin to capture brand images. We gave it our all.
What we can say is that the process we ran brought the organization’s diverse and sometimes disconnected internal stakeholders together to reconnect with, re-express, and elevate Safe Horizon’s core values. We hope that this buy-in helps to carry their spirits through these challenging times.
“Design for Progress stands out in brand strategy and creative development. Their positive and unique mix of humble curiosity and strong issue knowledge have allowed them to ask the right questions, build buy in, and uncover valuable opportunities that we might have otherwise missed. They have a remarkable ability to allow all levels of staff to feel comfortable with them and to align brand strategy and design with our own vision for the organization's future. In short, they truly just ‘get it’.”
Hannah Collins, Associate Vice President of External Communications, Safe Horizon ← Numerous Partners