 Welcome everyone to our webinar, Building a Strong Brand for Your Organization. I'm Susan Hope Bard, the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup, and it's my pleasure to host this event today. Before we actually get started bringing you the event, I'd like to talk a little bit about the platform that we're using. We do use the ReadyTalk platform, so as you're either logging in now or you logged in earlier, you might have heard music coming from your computer speakers. Most of the time you will be hearing music come from your computer speakers. You can chat to ask us any questions you might have in the left-hand column. There's a chat box. You will see us chatting different things out to you. It could be a link to events or to some websites that we'll be referencing. You don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat into the chat box. All of the lines are muted. If you're having any difficulty seeing or hearing the event, please chat into the chat box and we will help you on the tech side of things. If you lose your Internet connection, you can reconnect using the link that was emailed to you. And if you lose your phone connection that you're, if you've called in, you could just redial the phone number and rejoin. The calling number for this event is 888-299-7211L. And the code that you will use is 53789. And Becky will be chatting that out to everyone as well. Again, you don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat into the chat box. As I mentioned, we are recording this event. We will host, when we will post this event in about a week on our archives. We will also be putting this event in our course, Design for Non-Designers 101 in our learning management system. And we'll talk about that a little later. You will receive an email with this presentation along with the recording and any links we mentioned in a few days. You can find out about upcoming and past webinars on the TechSoup website at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You can also tweet us at TechSoup or using hashtag TS webinars. And again, the call in number for this event, if you're not hearing the sound come through your computer speakers, that is the default, you can call in at 888-299-7210 with the code 53789. Let me talk a little bit about our amazing speaker today, Gopika, who is the owner and Creative Director at Elephant Designs. She started Elephant as a way to bring thoughtful design to world-changing brands. And in addition to leading a multi-disciplinary team and a variety of prints and interactive pieces, Gopika also teaches design at the University of San Francisco. She curates events and leads workshops focused on design for social impact, so for folks just like you. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Good, Wired, Italy, and Design Like You Give a Damn. She's an active member of the design community and has given talks at Facebook, Women in Design, and Net Impact. Also, Gopika has worked with us very closely to develop a course for you for nonprofits and libraries. And it's our free course, Design for Non-Designers 101. And I will be navigating through that a little later on today after Gopika's presentation. As I mentioned, I'm Susan Hope Bard, the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup. We also, on the back end, we have Abigail Maravalli from Elephant Design. She's going to be helping with chat as you chat in your questions. And Becky Wiegand is also on the back end from TechSoup. She is going to help you with any tech problems you have. Again, throughout the event you should feel free to chat all of your questions in. You don't need to wait for the opportunity for Q&A. We'll simply queue those up for Gopika to address during brief Q&A sessions. Also, if at any point in time, if you have any issues hearing or seeing, just chat us in the chat box. The objectives of today, we want you to understand the basic elements of brand design guidelines. We also want you to understand the importance and value of branding your organization. Gopika will also help identify core elements of your brand guidelines to help your nonprofit or library create a strong brand. We will also have an opportunity for a Q&A session. As I mentioned, we'll be queuing up your questions throughout this event. We will also be following up with an email that will have a link to the recording, the presentation, and any links that we discussed during the day. To get us started, I'm going to talk a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is located here in San Francisco, California. While I'm telling you about TechSoup, go ahead and chat in where you are joining us from. So go ahead and chat in the city and the state or the country that you are joining us from. TechSoup is a 501c3 nonprofit just like many of you joining us today. And we work to empower organizations around the world to help you get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help you achieve your mission. And you can see from our map here, we serve almost every country in the world. We have about 62 partner NGOs all around the world. Oh wow, we've got folks joining us from it. This chat box is going crazy now. Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Ohio, Georgia, San Diego, Maryland, that's my home state, same as Gopika. Gopika and I are both from Baltimore, Maryland originally. So thank you for joining us. I'm very happy that everyone is here. And I am going to get us started up some folks from the UK. I know it's like 9 hours later there, so thank you for joining us at night. You, as people that are chatting in, you will only be able to see chat that comes from the presenters. But don't worry, we'll share everything with you. If someone chats in a tip, we can share that out with you during the event. So now we're going to have a short poll. So the question is, what is your experience with Brand Guidelines? Are you, what are Brand Guidelines? You're not really sure. Do you know what they are, but you don't use them? Does your organization have formal Brand Guidelines? Or are you really a master and you could rock this webinar yourself? Go ahead and just click on the radio button that best represents you. If you can't click on the radio button, you can go ahead and chat into the chat box. And I'm going to give us a few more seconds to answer this question. We have about 450 people in the event itself, so that's a lot of folks. I want to give you the opportunity to answer. It looks like a lot of folks are in the top two categories where they're not sure what Brand Guidelines are, or they know what they are, but they don't use them. So we're definitely in the right place today. So I'm going to give us 5 seconds, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I'm going to show you the results. So it looks like about 83% of us really are new to this concept of Brand Guidelines, or you may have them in your organization, but you don't really use them. So you are definitely in the right place today. And I am going to turn the presentation over to Gopika from Elephant, and she is going to share with you today all about building a strong brand. Gopika, it's all yours. Okay, great. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, Susan. And thanks everyone for joining today for this webinar. My name is Gopika, and I'm the founder and creative director at Elephant. And like Susan mentioned, I set out to start Elephant as a way to bring really high quality design to social causes. We're also based here in San Francisco. It's lovely to have TechSoup as our neighbor. And since we started out, we've worked with more than 300 nonprofits around the world. Some of our specialties include branding, and web design, and pretty much everything in between. So we're a full service studio. We recently launched our very first online design curriculum with TechSoup, which is so much fun to create. And hopefully it looks like a lot of you are interested in learning about what Brand Guidelines are. So that free course walks you through that, gives you some steps to building out your own. So over the next hour or so, I'll be discussing what makes a strong brand, and walking you through some examples of brands that I love. Some of the examples are from our own clients, Elephant clients, while others are pulled from my library of inspiration. So every designer will have a sort of pool of inspiration. So I'm going to share some of that with you. Definitely post some questions to the chat group throughout as we go, and as time allows, I'll pause and answer your questions. Okay, so let's get started. All right, so we all want a strong, memorable brand. It's one of our favorite types of projects at Elephant, because it relies on a deep understanding of who you are as an organization, and how you want to express yourself to the world. Branding projects require a lot of teamwork, collaboration, intuition, and creativity. This may sound like a lot, but the fact that you're in this webinar is a really great start. I'm hoping to cover the basics with you and get some of your creative juices flowing on how you can tackle your organization's branding. So what is a brand? We typically think of our website and print materials, all the things that you can see as our branding, but it's really much, much more than that. A brand is your personality, and it extends well beyond the printed page. When done right, people understand who you are. They can recognize your cause, and they remember you. Whenever we work on a branding project at Elephant, we start off by personifying the organization. We ask our clients certain questions that give us a better sense of this personality. Questions include what kind of music does this brand listen to? Where does it go for fun? What's your brand's favorite outfit? These questions, however silly they may seem, allow our clients to think outside the box and begin to see their brand as more than just a logo. So this is a really fun part for us because we get into the abstract, the aspirations. Maybe there's a certain outfit the brand wears today, but there's a certain outfit that the brand wants to wear in a year from now. Understanding that and thinking about the brand in terms of a person and those unique interests and preferences helps me as a designer get into certain decisions. And I'll walk you through some of that thought process later on in this presentation. So in essence, your brand is a combination of soul, heart, and mind. The more you understand about each of these aspects of your organization, the stronger your brand will be. So let's take a look at each of these levels in more detail. Your true north is the soul of your organization. It's defined by your values and purpose on this planet. And sometimes it's a little difficult to sum up in words. Most founders and executive directors will have unique anecdotes and ways of thinking about the organization. Strong brands will be able to integrate these powerful insights into every touch point of your brand. And what I mean by touch point is any sort of point where another person is interacting with your brand. So it could be a physical space, it could be a storefront, it could be a project or a program you're running on the ground interacting with a staff member or visiting your website, getting your press kit, getting your business card. All of these are considered touch points. Later in the presentation I'll walk you through how companies like Patagonia have done this very well. So the spirit of your organization or your true north can also be found in your mission and vision statements and should definitely live somewhere on your website. Sometimes we forget to include this, but after this webinar maybe do a quick check and make sure this exists on your website. Whether you're developing a brand from scratch or looking to enhance an existing one, here are a few exercises that can help you articulate your true north. So we recently worked with a nonprofit who was struggling to articulate what they did in a clear and concise way. To help them out we hosted a full day workshop where their core team worked together to develop a brand personality. Five people across departments in different leadership positions spent the day brainstorming with us. Sometimes getting to a point of clarity around your mission or your vision requires non-linear thinking. In order for us to get to their true north statement we first had to clearly define who the organization was and what they did. It seems simple enough, right? You can typically say what you do in a sentence, but what was interesting is that everybody on the team had a very different way of explaining what the organization did in a simple sentence. So finding that right language and tone can be challenging and doing it with a diverse team among your organization. Getting the executive director to sit with the communications person to sit with an intern or someone who received your programming can be really helpful to get to that sort of what statement. So once we developed a clear what statement for this organization we then asked why? Why do we exist? Why does this organization exist? A simple keyword exercise helped us further define the organization. So we had the very straightforward what the organization did. And some of these words came easily. It was through our conversations around their brand personality that we discovered that their brand was also confident, yet humble, excited, and ready for the future. So there were these little surprises, things that the team hadn't yet thought about or words that they hadn't yet identified as being really integral to their brand and true to their brand. So by identifying these five keywords we were able to lay the foundation for a clear and strong brand for this particular nonprofit. A series of exercises led us to this point of defining guiding principles for the brand. Now that they know that every touch point of their brand should be personal, warm, and exciting I'll just point to here. These are the three main principles that we identified after a series of conversations. And why that was important was moving forward outside of the engagement with Elephant when their team is going to create a new post on Instagram or select brand colors or make their next hire, they can use these principles to ensure that they stay on point. So in essence, guiding principles provide you with a concrete unwavering framework that ensures every decision you make is well informed and tells an authentic story. And that's super important in establishing a strong brand. Sometimes overlooked and we want to get straight into visual design but I'm sure a lot of us have stared at a computer and looked at all of the colors and all of the fonts possible and been sort of stuck where you start. And so these sort of preliminary conversations can really help you start to make decisions and narrow down options. The sort of high level and philosophical thinking can also help you tap into something much bigger and identify at the end of the day the soul of the brand. The second level of your brand is your visual identity. With a clear understanding of your values, guiding principles, and personality, you can start to create materials that reflect the spirit of your organization. If you determine, for example, that your values are placing warm and delightful, then you could choose brighter, more vibrant colors. If your brand is professional and grounded and excellent, then a serif font and limited color palette could be a better reflection of your values. And of course, this is all hypothetical. I'm not saying that if you're a profession, if you want to come across as professional, use a limited color palette. There's countless examples that would break that. This is just to give you a sense of if you start off the process by identifying certain characteristics and adjectives that are very unique to your organization, you can then start to hone in on certain visual elements that speak to those words. So let's take a look at how this played out for one of our clients this past year. So let's see here. New Door Ventures is a nonprofit in San Francisco and they provide job training and entrepreneurship skills to youth in the Mission neighborhood. Upon redesigning their website, we went to their headquarters, which was so exciting. It was really inspiring to see. And the first floor was a youth community center. It had lots of vibrant colors, a pool table area for workshopping. And the top floor was a little bit more subdued, and it was dedicated to their C-level offices, so it seemed appropriate. But they also were able to intersperse some really fun elements. So for example, they had this bright orange spiral staircase in the middle of an otherwise sort of regular office space. They also had bright green columns and then some wood paneling with hand lettering on it. So it added so much character to an otherwise somewhat regular corporate space. So visiting their actual office space helped us to immediately get a better understanding of who New Door was as an organization. It wasn't coming across in their old website, and we actually just launched a new website, so I'm unable to show you a comparison at the moment. But when we started the process, it was clear that the org was deeply dedicated to serving a youth. They had a super strong track record and really well-established partnerships that helped them achieve their mission. And the interesting thing for us was that their sort of personality, the friendliness, the way that they accommodate their youth was not coming across in their materials. There was a lighthearted and playful element that we really wanted to be able to capture and integrate into the website and this particular touch point of their brand. So as I said, New Door had gone through this sort of redesign of their interior space, and they had identified certain values that helped them do that. So this is an example of a mood board, just a hodgepodge of example images they pulled for inspiration and some keywords like youth-friendly, welcoming, safe, dynamic, vibrant. And these same keywords helped inform our design decisions when it came to the website. We started our process off with a series of our own mood boards. And for those of you who aren't familiar with them, mood boards easily translate emotions and ideas of feelings into visuals. So this is a light example of that. They also act as inspiration and can help facilitate really great conversations between you and your team. Pinterest is a great tool you can use to build out your own mood board. I'm sure some of us have used it before to plan a party or search for that perfect cupcake design. But we also, you know, we use InVision most of the time to create our mood board. So let's take a look at some examples here. So like I said, mood boards help you and your team get on the same page and establish a mutually agreed upon direction for your brand. In this example, it was important for us to create a bold, vibrant community feel. And without me saying much, I mean, if you look at this, the colors we chose, the sort of font choices, the way things are arranged should bring out those sort of feelings for you. There's probably more. There's probably things that you agree with or things that you don't agree with or images that resonate with you and images that you're like, oh, I don't really like that. And that's the point of the mood board. It's not to have every single element on the page be exactly what you want. It's basically the spark conversation. And literally, you can print this out and with a Sharpie, cross off images that just aren't working. So our earlier conversations with the client around their brand voice and personality helped us identify keywords and pull together an assortment of images that spoke to those qualities. So it's a little bit small, probably on your screen, but over here on the left-hand column, we pulled out some of the keywords related to their tone and then offered a little bit more context. So they're in San Francisco. We have the ability to meet with them in person and have plenty of conversations around the images that work for them. But if you're emailing them out, if you want to get the input from your friends, your family, or colleagues that are in other offices, definitely including some sort of insight around the image selection will be really helpful. So we put together a series of boards focused on unique aspects of their brand, starting with imagery. For imagery, it was really important that we captured both the individuality of a person as well as the community aspect of the org. So these were two things that were really emphasized and were coming from the organization. So this is where all of that preliminary conversations around what's really important to you as an organization is important. There's so many different ways of understanding community or individuality for that matter. And my goal in putting together these images was to give a nice variety that met the client's criteria for what community is and what individuality is. This opened up conversations. We had a little bit of a design critique and some really great discussions that served as a valuable next step in the design process. So in this particular example, the client really likes the image over here. They particularly like this because of the different color hands and the motion and the liveliness of it. They loved all the different colors and their previous brand was stripped of color. I think they were just using black, white, and green. So there was a certain dynamism to this image that actually opened up a lot of conversations. At the same time, they really gravitated towards this image. So it was a combination of an individual person, a photo, and fun illustrations. And you can see that there's a pretty large contrast between this sort of style and this style. And so even that was great from a design perspective to discuss that. What is it about this particular image or collage that really spoke to them and spoke to their brand? By selecting and ruling out certain imagery, we were able to conclude that original photography of their target audiences, in that case it was youth between the ages of I think like 16 to 24, would be crucial in establishing an authentic brand. So stock photos or generic images of any group or individual just wouldn't work for them. By identifying the visual design criteria early on, they could then plan next steps like scheduling a photo shoot or identifying images they already had that met their newfound criteria. So moving on to the next board in the series, this board was dedicated to typography and needed to reflect a bold, professional, and clean look. The client really valued accessibility and their brand values dictated the same. So when we pulled font examples together, we went for written text that was easy to read and that would translate well across print and web. While there is a science to typography and choosing the right font, a lot of this is subjective. There's also thousands of fonts to choose from. So mood boards but narrowed down options are extremely helpful before entering the process of actually selecting a font. So these boards included mostly sans-serif fonts. And what I mean by sans-serif font is you can see that they are super clean. They don't have what's called arms and legs. This font that is used for the headline up here for workbook and it might be a little tiny for you. That's an example of a serif font. So this client was definitely gravitating towards the sans-serif font and liked a little, just a splash of character. So you can see here with the K, while the typeface is really simple more or less, there were these unique little qualities built into the font that the client really loved. So when you know where on the spectrum your brand follows in terms of simple tornadoes, you can then start to narrow down and identify the right fonts for you. The last mood board in the series and then I'll maybe pause for questions is dedicated to illustration style. There may be some elements on the board that really stand out and resonate with you and your team, while other images or elements not so much. Being able to articulate what's working for you and how a particular element relates to your brand and brand values will help keep you on track and ensure the visual direction for your brand is on point. So what typically happens when we show mood boards to a client is there's some things that people agree upon and then there's definitely points of disagreement around a particular image or style. So you want to take these sort of points of disagreement as an opportunity to differ and understand why we disagree. So don't try and convince the other person that this is the way we should go. That could be another stage in the process. Really use the mood board as a conversation opener. You want to be an observer, a listener. You want to understand the rationale of others on your team. And why that's helpful is if you're wearing a designer hat and you're ultimately creating assets or materials for your organization, you want as much buy-in from others as possible. You want people to use the brand book that you create. You want people to love the brochure that you're designing. And the more people feel part of the process and that they're listening to, the more they're going to respect your work and your point of view. So with this illustration board what happened was there was part of the team that really loved this style. Line-based illustrations with just a splash of color, very simplistic. And then there were some people that really liked this style. Now you might think it's similar, but this actually opened up a lot of conversation around the type of character and the form of the character. So if you look at this illustration in the top area, you can see that the illustrations are a little bit more abstract, different colors, definitely not realistic. And it had a youthful feel, same with here, a very youthful feel. And it was important for this brand that they didn't come across as too young. They wanted to seem professional and authoritative, but also accessible. And so we had these really great conversations around why this form actually spoke to some people. And it turned out that everybody was on the same page. It was just that the visual spoke to each person in a different way. And so that's why I say it's really important to not shoot someone down or say, oh no, no, no, we'll never go in that direction because often we're saying the same thing and we're just speaking a different language. And so the more you can understand the language of the people on your team, the better off you'll be. So I've definitely come to really enjoy disagreement. And it's these moments that make me pause and I can play devil's advocate and sort of push people to articulate their thoughts and ideas. It's really the disagreement that lets me as a designer achieve clarity and ultimately helps me deliver visuals that are very much in line with my client's goals and those of the brand. Since so much of what we're discussing is subjective, mood boards help you dissect the nuance and ambiguity around these ideas and personal preferences. I've found them useful in pretty much every design project, whether it's a logo or a website or even a themed impact report. Another tip I should mention is that there's a certain vocabulary you can start to develop by reading design articles or publications. So you can check out communication arts or Behance and even Dribble. So Behance and Dribble are both online communities. Communication arts also has an online component, but I think you have to have a subscription to read all of the articles. But the more you read and the more you sort of learn in terms of design vocabulary, the more you're going to be able to speak about your work and your brand and your design decisions. And people will just inherently have more confidence in what you're doing and creating. So that's a little bit of a tangent. It's more about design leadership and owning your decisions. You wouldn't, for example, want to put together mood boards and someone asks you a question and you're not able to back up your ideas. So it's definitely helpful, like I said, include some notes and just provide context so people understand your line of thinking in the event you're not presenting them in person. So I'm just going to pause for a moment and see if anyone has some questions. We do. We have got about 20 questions in the queue, so I think we'll take a few right now and then definitely save 10 minutes at the end for some more questions. So Marjorie asks, once an organization has identified its brand, does it ever change? Does the organization's strategic plan have any connection with its brand? Yeah, that's a really great question. The short answer is yes. I think that a brand that sticks with what was, I mean we've worked with a lot of organizations that were founded 15, 30 years ago. And there are certain principles that remain true today, but then there are so many new programs or services or offerings that your organization now offers and your brand doesn't really encompass the full suite or that full sort of spectrum of what you're doing. And so every once in a while and that timeframe, it's hard for me to say like, okay, after a year you want to do this, after five years you want to do this, but typically at the end of the year it is a point of reflection, right? Individually we kind of look at our life and say, okay, this is what has worked and these are my resolutions for the future. And I think the same is true for an organization. It's almost like a gut check where at the end of the year you can say okay, yeah, we're moving in the direction that we want to be moving in and because of whatever's happened in the past six months we're now kind of changing our strategic plan. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to change your logo and your website and your brand from a visual standpoint. It could mean looking at your content and looking at how you're talking about your brand. That's kind of a short-hand version of it, but I say that what we've seen with our clients is probably every three to five years there's a larger sort of gut check that happens where they do want to revisit their logo or branding and it could be a slight modification or a complete overhaul and that's really dependent on the direction that the organization is taking. Thank you. That's a super helpful explanation. The next question comes from Dallery and I hope I'm not butchering this person's first name, so my apologies. They wonder how do people working on defining brand guidelines address generational differences in their community? Yeah, that's a really good question and I mean that's something that's true for every single brand. You're designing and creating something for a wide range of people and so there are a lot of exercises that can help you identify your target audiences and be really clear on who that is. While aspirationally we want to serve everyone under the sun, realistically you could probably group your main audiences into one to three types of people. And there's personas that can help you develop language or aspects of your brand that speak to a specific demographic or age group or type of subset within your audiences. There's also what's called archetypes. So say there's 100 different types of people that you're trying to serve. If you really analyze those people you can group them based on their interests and that's what I mean by an archetype. So maybe there's a group of people that it doesn't matter what age they are, they're all curious in learning. And this is a hypothetical for a non-existent brand right now but this whole group is interested in learning. So what does that mean for you as an organization? How do you provide a platform or portal for learning on your website or in your materials? And so while there might be gaps in generations, a learning curve to certain technology, there are ways for you to start to group your key audiences and develop personalities for them. So personas is one exercise that's really fun. We can send as a follow-up some helpful resources to develop those for yourself. And then I guess the other part to that is if specifically your question is there's this gap in generations and maybe a learning curve because of that that needs to happen internally, then the more you're stepping in the shoes of the people you're designing for, creating for, the more you're going to understand them as people, not as an age group or as an archetype per se, but as an actually living, breathing human being that you can relate to. And if you can do that as a person, then you can translate those insights into your design. Thank you. I think one more for this break and then we're going to transition to the rest of your presentation. Very quickly a lot of folks have chatted in what tool did you use to create these mood boards? And perhaps define mood boards one more time. And I know there are three that you covered, typography, imagery, and illustration. So if you could just talk about how you did that, what tools do you recommend they use to do one of their own? Sure. So mood boards, I use InDesign because it just lets you crop images really well. You can also use Pinterest as a tool where it might not look exactly like what you see here, but definitely gives you a nice compilation of imagery and then you can make comments and have it be very collaborative. What a mood board is, is they basically translate emotion, ideas, and feelings, so all of the intangible aspects of your brand into visual. And they also help you facilitate conversations between you and your team. So you can look at these sort of pulled sound examples. So just to clarify on this mood board here for illustration is I didn't create any of these illustrations from scratch. They were all pulled from sites like Behance and the Internet and just different design inspiration sources that I have. And I use them as talking points throughout the process. And the way you break down your mood boards can change. So just for this particular client I chose to do imagery, typography, and illustration. You could have a mood board just on color. You could have a mood board on pattern. It really depends on your organization and who you are working with and what the brand sort of requires. Thanks so much. Okay, so I think we'll just jump into the rest of the presentation. So the last sort of layer of your brand is your actions. So just as your true north and visual identity tell a story about your organization, so do the people and policies behind your brand. This is often an overlooked element of the branding process. And I'm not going to spend a terrible amount of time talking about it, but it's definitely a very important aspect to consider. So say for example you're an environmentally conscious company, but your office uses diaphragm cups. If part of your mission is to bring more compostable materials into the world, but your own office hasn't changed their purchasing policies, then there's an obvious disconnect that dilutes your brand. And it's not a very authentic story. So at Ellison, we value excellence, care, and playfulness. These are three of the sort of values we hold as our true north as a studio. And so when we're hiring, we look for these qualities in a candidate. So you might be an amazing designer, but you don't really care about the work that you're doing or the clients that you're serving, and you don't bring a sense of humor to the office. And so that type of person is going to affect our studio culture and it's going to dilute how people feel about Ellison when interacting with us in person. So that's just one example of how your brand, the people, policies are all coexisting to tell your story. So I'm just going to flip to a few other examples. So here is a shoe company called Allbirds that uses ZQ Certified Merino wool. This means that they meet really high standards of sustainable farming and animal welfare. And at the same time, they care about your comfort. I don't work for Allbirds nor do I have an understanding of their internal policies. So these insights are pulled primarily from my experience as a potential consumer. So I'm looking at it from the outside. I'd like to highlight basically how their brand ambassadors have successfully and in very little time, the company launched I think maybe a year ago or so. And in that amount of time, these ambassadors have shaped a very powerful and authentic story for them. So these are images that I pulled from their Instagram account. And without reading anything or talking to any of their employees, I got this immediate feeling of what they're about and what they value. They're fun. They care about the environment. They value comfort and excellence and design. They want you to be you in their shoes. Whether you're on their Instagram account or show up at one of their public locations, there's this seamless and uniform brand story. And the product is minimalist. They only offer a certain number of colors. But the personality comes out in these unique stories behind the photos, behind the packaging, behind their people. So yeah, we're not official Allbirds ambassadors. But yes, this picture in the middle with the elephant is definitely one of our favorites. The reason I first heard about Allbirds is actually from my colleague Abigail who stumbled upon their shoes in a pop-up in San Francisco. And she told me she would never have remembered anything about the company if it weren't for their memorable brand. How many organizations can you list as memorable? Not because of what you read or what they do, but because of how you felt when you interacted with it. At the end of the day, that's the goal. So it's also brand. And for someone who's worked with brands every day, I put a lot of thought into what makes a strong brand. For us, a thoughtful brand is authentic. It's memorable. It's reliable. And we often associate great branding with only the biggest and sexiest companies like Apple or Nike or Gatorade. We truly believe that the same guiding principles that make big brands memorable can also be applied to your organization, to this four good space. So I'm just going to look at a few examples within this nonprofit space, but it's strong branding and therefore have highlighted their cause to millions. I love this panda. For me, it doesn't just represent the World Wildlife Fund. It's also a symbol for animal rights and has been in use for about 50 years. Most of us recognize the panda. There are a number of design notes I could discuss right now, but I'll save that for another day. The one thing I'll note is that the reason the panda is so memorable is because they set us as a norm, choosing not to use an image of the world, a tree or holding hands, low as we see a lot in the nonprofit space. While it's extremely difficult to create such an iconic mark as this, our goal with any brand is to create something that's just as memorable and authentic. One thing to note and something that you would want to include in your brand guide is the rules and constraints around your mark. And the reason why this mark is so memorable is because the panda never changes. You never see it in color. You never see it stretch or flip. It never sits alongside other illustrations of animals. There are certain rules and guidelines that inform how this logo is used. And it's important with any brand to have strict guidelines on logo usage. This ensures consistency across all of your touch points. And if you want a little bit more information on how to construct a brand book or what goes into it, then remember to check out our Level 2 course because it goes into all the steps and elements in creating your own brand guidelines. It can definitely be tricky to stand out from all the noise. And there are thousands of organizations, for example, that are working to bring clean drinking water to remote regions of the world. And yet Charity Water is one of the most widely known from a brand perspective. When someone mentions Charity Water, I immediately think yellow plastic water container. They've successfully turned their physical product into an icon and universal symbol for water quality. Again, one that is widely known and recognized across the globe. I'm just going to go back to that slide. And I think we're going to pause and go to a poll. Yes, great. We're going to check and see. We've got lots of questions in our chat box as well, but just a quick polling question. So to see everybody that's been listening, what is a true statement about a thoughtful brand according to what Gopika just shared? A thoughtful brand is authentic. A thoughtful brand is memorable. A thoughtful brand is relatable. And you should be able to choose as many as you want. And I think a lot of the chat questions that have come in too are a lot about logos and copyrights, Gopika. So if you do have a chance to talk about that, that would be awesome. Sure. So are there questions about logos, the use of logos, or how to create a logo? It's about the use of the logo and copywriting. So if you could cover some copywriting issues with designing logos, and some of the challenges folks may have in nonprofits. Sure. So obviously you want to do a good amount of research in terms of what sort of logos and marks are out there and being used. And that takes some time. It's definitely worth it to print those examples out and just make sure that you're not creating anything that's already been in use. There's definitely outside consultants and design studios that help facilitate this process and make sure that anything that you're making isn't already trademarked or used widely in circulation. In terms of logo and really differentiating your brand, I think one of the biggest things is making sure that you're also not using the same or similar colors than similar organizations in the space. And so even putting together like a swatch board of the common used colors that are used for clean drinking water or animal rights or ocean conservation can help you add a little bit of an element of surprise to do something slightly different. It's hard. I don't know if I know enough about content writing and trademarking, but there's definitely, especially if you're engaging in outside service, they're specialists in this. And I wouldn't try and tackle that all in-house. Great. Thank you. So if you chose any one of these, you would be correct. And I love the fact that people thought a thoughtful brand is memorable. Yeah, that's great. Definitely thoughtful brands are authentic, memorable, relatable, all of those things. They speak to who you are and who you're not. A thoughtful brand is well executed. It'll legitimize your cause. And it will tell an authentic story. So we don't have a terrible amount of time so I just want to flip through a few of the remaining slides here. But just to leave you as a takeaway here is some of the core elements to a strong brand. And so we talked about having a clear mission and vision statement, having a visual identity that speaks to your values. So that means your logo, color palette, font choices, image style, creating a brand book that outlines some of the rules and guidelines around these elements. Making sure to share your brand book widely across the company. It's helpful to inspire people and get people excited about working. It's a fantastic training tool for new hires to get them on board. And in turn, it creates Brandemasters, people within the organization that feel so connected to the cause that they actively promote and advocate for your organization on their own time. So I think we have maybe a few minutes and I'll walk you through one more sort of common, or big brand, one that I love which is Patagonia. And the more, you know, we all probably recognize this logo or know the name. And I started to, I've been a big fan of Patagonia since I was in middle school. And it was because my friends shop there and growing up on the East Coast, it was the perfect fleece. They gave me the perfect fleece for East Coast winters. The more I learned about the company, the more committed I was to buying from them over other outdoor companies. And this is because I just, I've read, you know, before starting Elephant, I've read each Junard's book, Let My People Go Surfing. And I realized there was so much more to the product than just the jackets and amazing outdoor photos in every single catalog. I started to pay more attention to their branding and quickly recognized how authentic their story was from its founding. Patagonia is a B Corp. They actively counter consumerism, but they sell products that use natural resources. It seems counterintuitive, but they're exactly on brand. Because they have such a deep understanding of their values, they can put out controversial ad campaigns that change behavior while directly promoting their organizational values. And the point here is basically the more you know yourself, yourself being the organization, the more you're able to create authentic messaging and make your mark on the world. So here's an example of how they're doing this online. One part of their website, and this goes back to the question around copywriting and content, but here one part of their website is dedicated to showing consumers the environmental footprint of the clothing they sell. This dress is partially made up of recycled polyester and partially spandex. And they state why they aren't able to trace the source of their spandex. They're super transparent about it. And I think it's important to note that strong brands aren't necessarily aiming for perfection. They're aiming for authenticity. I feel like I have a little bit more in my presentation, but I'd love to leave some time now for any last remaining questions. And if there's time to go through another example, I can do that. Great. Thanks so much. We do. We have quite a lot of questions. And Rhonda asks, she has heard that modern design is, quote, flat with no use of embossing and shadows. Is that true, or is that just a statement somebody made about their particular brand? No, it's definitely, we're seeing a big trend, especially in product design and web design, towards what's called flat design. And so Google released something that's called material design. They have a really great website where you can actually walk through and understand that better. But it is stripped of a lot of shadows and things that make an icon or a logo feel realistic. And that shift is, it was a trend and it's still going. And that's not to say that every single brand needs to follow that. And I would actually recommend, I mean this is where understanding your values is really important because you don't want your brand to not withstand the test of time. And that's why that Panda for the World Wildlife Fund is so powerful for me because this form, it actually was a little bit different 20, 30 years ago. It was a little bit more realistic. And then they cleaned it up to have these sort of clean edges but still a very defined Panda. And so while your brand might shift and change over time, even if you look historically at our elephant in our mark, when we started out it was a little bit crazy looking. And then in the past year or two we cleaned it up to make it flatter and scale better. And so I wouldn't just go with a trend or read one article and say, okay we need to follow suit. I would really understand your own values and then make decisions accordingly. Great. Thanks so much. We also have a question about rebranding. So if you have an organization that has shifted and perhaps it's to state and you want to make it appeal to a younger demographic, is rebranding a good idea? Yeah, because I don't know the details I can't necessarily say whether a complete brand overall is required or if some aspects of your brand could be enhanced. And there's pros and cons to both. Now if you're looking at your brand and you just want it to be fresher and livelier and just speak to the organization of today and the future, then perhaps the brand overhaul is important. We've definitely worked with organizations that not only tackle their brand but also their name. So they want a new name that speaks to where they're heading in the next 10 years. And those are really good questions and conversations to start asking and having. Again, it's hard to definitively say in this webinar whether that's the right approach for you, but if you're finding that there's a huge part of your audience that isn't being spoken to and something is very dated about your content or your look, then some sort of refresh or rebranding might be needed. Great. Thanks. One more or maybe two more questions and also letting folks know that these questions will be shared with the presenters for them to respond to and to get back to you. Some of you have some very specific questions about your particular nonprofit. And Gopika and Abigail can certainly respond to some of those questions individually. One question that came up is, is there a difference between experience with developing a brand for a public library? Are there different challenges that you could see for a library branding than for a nonprofit? You know, for us it wouldn't necessarily matter that you're a library versus a nonprofit because ultimately you're there to serve a certain demographic. You have key audiences just like a nonprofit does just like a B Corp would or just like a for-profit does. So instead of comparing yourself to other nonprofits you have to ask yourself, what are your goals? What are the goals of the library? What are you trying to achieve? What are the goals of your audiences? And where are there points of intersection between the goals of you at the library and those of your target audiences? And then you can start to think about what sort of decisions you can make. And whether that means putting some more attention on your brand or how you're giving people access to books or periodicals or information. Ultimately you're providing a space where people can learn, the learning environment. So I would kind of step out of this, okay, is it important for me as a library and just versus a nonprofit and start to ask a question, what do we want to do in this sort of amount of time that we have and how do we go about doing that? Great. Thank you. We still do have a lot of questions in queue but we have run out of time. As I mentioned we will be forwarding these questions onto Copica and Abigail to answer and get back with you. They've agreed to do that. And some of these more specific questions about your nonprofit they may want to channel those right back to you to ask some additional questions or if you're interested in working with Elephant as a design team. So thank you so much for this. Obviously folks are fascinated with the information that you've shared and we could probably do three or four of these webinars about design. So really quickly can everyone just chat one thing in that they learned today? I know it's probably difficult to identify one thing but just chat one thing in that you learned today or you may try to implement. And keep in mind that we will share a list of resources particularly around logos, branding, mood boards, how to develop those and some best practices in addition to trying to address some of the more general questions in our follow-up email which you will receive in about a week. We do have a free course that Copica has developed that will answer many of the questions that you had in the chat box and you can find that on https.techsoup.course.tc.catalog. It is designed for non-designers 101. It is a free course. We really encourage you to go there. You will actually begin to build your, it's like a starter kit for Brand Guidelines and she's done an amazing job of building videos, PowerPoint presentations, and exercises to help you think through some of these processes that she's described today. Also coming up check out our webinars. We've got lots and lots of webinars in the month of March, easy for me to say. Join us for any of our QuickBooks, Desktop for either new nonprofit users or existing nonprofit users. Those of you here joining us from libraries, how to protect page and privacy in public libraries coming up next week, and also a TechSoup tour about technology donations coming up at the end of the month. I am so sorry we have run a little bit over time. I do want to remind everyone there is a survey we want you to take that will pop up as soon as you X out or as soon as you leave this event. Please do tell us the things that you liked about this, things that we can do better and suggestions for other topics. I want to really a most sincere and heartfelt thank you to Gopika and Abigail. They have worked very hard to create the free course Design for Non-Designers 101 and we will also come out with a follow-up course Design for Non-Designers 201 in a few weeks that will also be available on our TechSoup courses. So they are amazing resources and I do hope that folks do follow up with them to find out more. And I know that Abigail will chat out their email and website and perhaps their Twitter handle. Also a huge thank you on the back end to Becky for handling all the chat questions, tech challenges, and also re-chatting out some of your comments. And a huge thank you to all of you for hanging in there. Sorry we went a little over time. We know your most valuable asset is your time so we appreciate the hour and 4 minutes you spent with us today. Thank you so much. And thanks to ReadyTalk, our sponsor. So have a great rest of your day everybody. Bye-bye.