Hangup
The passionate voice of WQW’s founder swayed supporters for a decade, but bylaws mandated a changing of the guard. Now, the busy Executive Director needed to delegate communication efforts to a fast-growing team of staffers, volunteers, and vendors. But the WQW story required delicate handling—how could they efficiently hand it off to newcomers to the organization?
Fix
Incorporate and evolve WQW’s hard-won values and reputation to build a comprehensive brand and language guide. That way, everyone would have a solid template for crafting communications—consistently and powerfully.
Payoff
When the brand and language guide was revealed for the first time to almost twenty stakeholders (including the Executive Director and key staff), it was immediately approved, with the board following suit the next week. Now, everyone working on communications works from the same starting point. Small, on-point communication projects are already underway, with hopes to tackle a web overhaul and other major projects in the near future.
Elbow Grease
First, I interviewed key staff for in-depth, in-person discussions to round out our outside research. Then, I developed a brand and language guide that expanded on the organization’s existing mission, vision, and values and differentiated it from the hundreds of other organizations in a similar space. Longtime WQW-collaborator Classic Ink managed the relationship and design, while Latta Consultants tackled target audience research.
“I am very impressed with Kira’s ability to put themes, concepts and values into coherent, accurate, bite-sized, impactful language for our brand and language guide. Although we’ve worked in our respective industry for 10+ years, Kira was able to synthesize and communicate what exactly we were trying to do in a way we’d never accomplished before.”
—Faye Nelson, Executive Director