A rebranding and an interactive booklet encouraging a community of philanthropists to invest in their values
The Jewish Federation of the East Bay and the Jewish Community Foundation were two teams working together under one roof, serving as the charitable epicenter of the East Bay Jewish community.
The Federation focused on collective giving through its annual campaign and community engagement through its impact-grant process, while the Foundation focused on legacy giving through its various charitable giving funds.
In years prior, the two organizations had been cobranded to highlight their shared missions of building and sustaining the Jewish community.
However, this unity gave rise to a lead-generation challenge for the Foundation. High-capacity donors to the Federation’s annual campaign were largely unaware of the legacy-giving services offered by the Foundation. Instead many of these donors were choosing competitors like Fidelity, Schwab, or other community foundations to meet this need. The design challenge: how to distinguish the Foundation’s services from the Federation’s — and competitors’ — while remaining consistent with the Federation brand.
Role: project lead, product manager, content strategist
Tools: Adobe InDesign
Deep dive
Discover
Interviewing stakeholders and potential fundholders
We conducted interviews with the Federation and Foundation boards and executive team, Foundation fundholders, Federation donors who were not fundholders, and Jewish fundholders not affiliated with the Federation or Foundation. From these interviews, we gained insights into which product features and messaging resonated with these different audiences.
Define
Testing positioning statements
The insights from these interviews allowed us to create three different positioning statements to test with our stakeholders and potential fundholders. In a group exercise, everyone was given the statements on strips of paper, and they were given the option to splice them together. Each person then presented their reasoning for rearranging the statement as they did. The final positioning statement that we arrived at as a team was the following:
At the Jewish Community Foundation, we bring together like-minded people who are invested in building a better world through the core values of compassion, justice, and learning.
Iterate
Creating marketing collateral for the brand launch
To finish the brand rollout, we redesigned our collateral to reflect the insights gained through the design-thinking process. Guided by the experience of a user interested in opening a Foundation fund, we streamlined and developed our toolkit into a multichannel experience. Working with stakeholders, I created and edited content for a style guide, website, sales brochure, and signage.