The Children's Society

Non-profits

The Children’s Society has a new voice.

The Children’s Society has unveiled the new brand identity we’ve created for them, as it steps up its fight to expose the hard truths behind child poverty and teenage neglect across the country.

General awareness of the charity’s work has fallen over the last few years and in-depth research revealed that investing in a more impactful visual identity was crucial to having the greatest possible impact on the lives of this country’s most disadvantaged children. It is the first time The Children’s Society has changed its visual identity in 16 years and this change will support the charity to strongly communicate what it does and have more traction with supporters, commissioners, funders and other key audiences.

We created the visual identity, placing a strong emphasis on storytelling and the revealing of hard truths. The black and white emphasises the serious nature of the charity’s work, while allowing great flexibility to work with bolder colours and designs for different audiences.

The Children’s Society had conducted eight months of research before our involvement, talking to children, staff, supporters, volunteers and the church audience from across the UK to find common values as well as input for the charity’s vision and mission. At this stage we did our own interviews with Trustees and the Senior Leadership Team as well as sending a team including our Creative Director Laura Hussey and designer Cosmo Jameson to talk directly to a group of disadvantaged children on an away day that consisted of a brand workshop followed by a paint balling session(!) which our designers found really useful (as well as painful) as it put a face to the people we were trying to help.

130 years

Since the rebrand, the charity has seen the best financial results in over a century.

There were several key learnings from the research, but the main one was that there was no commonly held clear consensus of what The Children’s Society did or what it stood for. There were disconnects between staff and HQ as one would expect in a multi-issue organisation that campaigns as well as cares. What was also clear was that the market was cluttered and competitive with duplication of activity. The good news was that there was high appetite for change and an acknowledgement for the need and desire for a common purpose. We took all this research and, we created five core positioning statements, holding further workshops with different teams from across the organisation in order to see which resonated the most. By far the most liked was the core thought of ‘Hard Truths’.

The Children’s Society exposes and directly addresses the hard truths that children face in society today, fighting inequality at the highest level while supporting children in their personal development and delivering care where it is most needed. ‘Hard truths’ directly underpins the charity’s existing strategic focus which is to fight childhood poverty and teenage neglect. Together we helped express this as their vision: ‘A country where children are free from disadvantage’.

The Children’s Society will be rolling out the new brand gradually over the next year in order to help keep costs down, put value for money at the forefront and make sure it is implemented in the most effective way.

3 months

In the first three months since the rebrand, statistics show direct marketing responses are significantly increased and the seasonal Christingle campaign, has achieved the highest ever level of success since the brand began 130 years ago.

The Children’s Society’s Chief Executive Matthew Reed said: “For the last 130 years, The Children’s Society has been an organisation constantly changing and adapting, pushing the boundaries whilst looking for new and innovative ways to help disadvantaged children.

We are an ambitious organisation and we want to have the greatest impact on the most children possible. To do that, we are investing in significant changes to every part of the organisation.

MATTHEW REED CHIEF EXECUTIVE

We are changing the way we deliver services, engage supporters and campaign for change. Investing in a new brand and visual identity is a vital part of that change. “A brand is about more than a visual identity and a logo. It informs everything we do as an organisation: Our vision, our mission and our values and behaviours. It reflects the history of our charity and will determine our future.”

SomeOne co-founder David Law said: “It was a key criteria of our work that the new identity had to not only be bold and impactful to recognise the hard truths that The Children’s Society seeks to expose, but it also has to stand out amongst the rest of the charitable sector.

The amazing work The Children’s Society does really resonated with us as an agency and our designers worked hard to create an identity that could live up to that. Transformational change comes from within and we see this as a symbol of change, not just a change of symbol.”