Launched in 1988 with an all-purple logo and an admirable dream, LA’s BEST is a highly successful afterschool enrichment, education, and recreation program serving 28,000 economically underprivileged elementary school students in Los Angeles. Beginning in 2006, DISTINC helped the organization craft a compelling brand identity and implement and communicate it across 180 public school sites. The resulting program incorporates DISTINC’s ideas across a vast range of materials, including branding, promotional, marketing and fundraising collateral, online presence, year-end reports, and viral campaigns. The strategy has worked, engaging donors’ hearts — as well as their checkbooks and credit cards.
“We grew together,” explains Jean-Marc Durviaux. To begin with, DISTINC inaugurated a series of “better understanding boards” — visual aids to help the organization clarify and refine its core values and assets — and a graphic language to move it visually from a one-color world into a full-spectrum brand identity. Working directly with the .org’s CEO and communications director, DISTINC’s team set upon creating a strategic plan for the long-term management of LA’s BEST’s communication, eventually presenting its ideas to the board of directors and more than 200 field directors.
STRATEGIES AND SHOELACES
Some parts are old; some are new. The original logo is now anchored in nine colors and shapes, reflecting the myriad benefits the program provides. Photographs fill the annual report and children’s art is now the centerpiece of the organization’s annual fund-raising brunch program. A simple sans typeface conveys both the seriousness of the cause and the inherent playfulness of its recipients. Whether through direct mail or a pair of shoelaces, all materials at once convey a friendly, professional, and positive feel.
The results of the new brand identity have been significant: a theme, consistent across media and materials, that embraces a positive vision of healthy, happy children, and an identity based on “Change Starts Here,” an aspiration driven to action with thought-provoking copywriting, fresh photography, and bold graphic design. Built using a contemporary visual language, the organization’s identity is never stuffy or saccharine, but instead compelling and compassionate, in equal balance with the optimism and promise of the program’s young beneficiaries.
QUALITY MATERIALS FOR A QUALITY PROGRAM
Without being heavy-handed, DISTINC’s work with LA’s BEST engages potential donors in a dialogue about the future of children, connecting with the community and proving an organization willing to invest in fresh, full-budget branding and design can expect to see significant results. The work has won numerous awards and peer-judged design competitions in PRINT, Communication Arts, and elsewhere. “We sought to push the standard,” says Jean-Marc Durviaux, and LA’s BEST has the successful numbers to prove it: by 2010, the organization had been recognized as one of the nation’s top after-school programs, doubling its donor database and, even in a restricted economic climate, continuing to expand the number of children its program serves.
