CHALLENGE: In 2011, after 50 years focusing on individual donors and needing to grow support for their work with greater reach, a decision was made by World Vision leadership to strategically call upon U.S. churches to support and pursue solutions to the growing humanitarian crisis both globally and locally. In doing so, World Vision needed not only a marketing strategy for widespread connection with the church but to craft their brand message and image toward pastoral and church leadership engagement in a way that spoke to their Christian history and ethos.

 

SOLUTION: On the heels of that decision, World Vision leadership structured a department for church engagement and not long following, I was contacted for the branding deployment on ‘World Vision Churches’, which would come to include website messaging and design as well as the design of all print & social media collateral.

 

Building upon the World Vision brand mark, I first developed a cohesive identity system completely unique to their organization brand mark, that up to this time, had never been employed.

 

I started by creating a ‘content enclosure’ utilizing the curved shape of the organization’s curved orange icon, as seen in the accompanying examples. Utilizing that system not only worked well on the web, but served a strong reinforcement in all print collateral, from brochures to fact sheets and ad development.

 

Second, to differentiate the brand’s image library from a glut of increasingly common ‘third world photography’, I chose to employ the use of a grayscale treatment for background elements of the imagery while leaving the main characters of the visual storytelling in color, to subtly bring a tighter focus to the human element.

 

Third, I zeroed in on pastoral mission with the messaging, inviting ministry leaders to not only voice ‘their world vision’  but to take action in a shared collaborative ‘dreamwork’ between the two organizations. Rather than posturing World Vision as the leader in the relationship, we set out on a message directive that chose to elevate the position of the church in the work, freeing up the collective mindshare of the pastoral teams to own the vision themselves, and proactively lead their churches into a passionate ‘shared action’, based on common goals between their respective churches and World Vision works in progress, placing World Vision in the seat of a service opportunity provider that enables and empowers church humanitarian and gospel mission.

 

The end result was a marketing effort with a website launch, social media push and print download arsenal that increased church engagement across U.S Churches, informing and inspiring churches to action that is continued to this day.

 

NEXT STEPS: If you are an organizational leader with a mandate to increase your reach or effectiveness in communication, I strongly encourage you to reach out and make contact for your next endeavor. Whether your need lies within core brand strategy, web development, email design, video production, photography, social media deployment or print collateral, I can fill the bill.