HELSINQI CREATIVE

YWCA of Greater Portland

During 2009 the YWCA of Greater Portland refocused their critical mission in the community, and chose HELSINQI as their partner to refocus the message. We worked closely with them to create a strategic messaging plan that included unveiling their redesigned "4-in-1" mission, and an ambitious campaign of client stories and photographs called Lives Changed.

Our work encompassed strategy, planning, writing, and design of revitalized brand identity, advertising, print collateral and posters, video consultation, client interviews and story writing, photo production, PR consultation, digital communications consultation, and more.

As enthusiastic Presenting Sponsors of their 18th Annual Leadership Luncheon, we provided creative messaging for the event, including our innovative Fortune Teller, a fun and interactive informational print piece.

In addition to external communications, we focused on internal communications to help the new brand messaging take hold among the board and staff. This included special collateral, presentations, and a comprehensive brand guide.

We are honored to have helped this venerable organization fulfill its mission in service to the community — and to have the opportunity to work with the dedicated people who make it happen.

Discovery & Foundation

We began by going deep to really understand the organization, interviewing management, staff, board members, clients, and talking to the community. We sleuthed after not just its stated mission and values, but its history, its current operational and communications realities, and the future it seeks to live into.

Discovery credits: Anna & Leo Daedalus and Sherry Charles

Strategy & Concept

From that foundation we moved to strategy and concept, working with the YWCA to define the messaging objectives, forms, and channels. Two anchors of this effort were the Lives Changed campaign and the Universe Graphic.

Universe Graphic

The swift, visionary changes enacted in 2009 had been so radical that the internal stakeholders themselves needed a direct and lucid way to internalize the re-visioned form and purpose. We devised a visualization graphic to accomplish that.

Quickly adopted by staff as the YWCA’s “Universe of Service,” this instrument diagrams the dynamic interrelation of the organization's form — its newly defined 4 Integrated Service Areas — with its purpose: to guide clients through 3 Stages of Empowerment. It maps that field with client success stories chosen from our Lives Changed campaign work.

In our presentations of the “Universe” to executive committees, staff, and the Executive Board, people repeatedly told us that now they “finally, really understand” the mission and purpose of the organization. We couldn’t have asked for better affirmation.

Universe credits:

• Leo Daedalus: concept, copywriting, design
• Anna Daedalus: copywriting, editing

Brand ID

Logo

While maintaining the immediately recognizable essentials of the national YWCA brand, the logo needed a warmer accent for Portland. We therefore designed a local version, now appearing on all visual communications.

Descriptor

Similarly, it was crucial to verbally express the true what & why of the re-visioned Portland YWCA, for which we wrote a multi-tier descriptor for various applications.

The Lives Changed Campaign

The YWCA knew they wanted a messaging campaign based on the actual success stories of their clients, so we developed the Lives Changed campaign. Drawing on hours of interviews we conducted with dozens of clients, we designed a format featuring the clients’ own words and warm, authentic color photography.

The Lives Changed campaign provided the conceptual and content anchor for the Posters, much of the Collateral, and the Ads.

Lives Changed credits:

• Anna Daedalus: concept, interviews, project management, photographic direction, copywriting
• Leo Daedalus: concept, design, copywriting
• Kathryn Elsesser: photography

Lives Changed Video

Additionally, we helped shape the Lives Changed short video produced by Carol Koon, stewarding message consistency and editing the script.

Print

Posters

We produced a series of five Posters drawn from the Lives Changed campaign: one for each of the 4 Integrated Service Areas, and one overall message.

Fortune Teller

You want your messaging to reach people on as many levels as possible, not just visually and verbally. And budget should never be an excuse. We needed a simple, emotionally direct tool to swiftly tell the story of the new, integrated purpose of the Portland YWCA, characterized by unity in the diversity of 4 Integrated Service Areas.

We hit on the idea of those paper "fortune tellers" we all remember from grade school. We turned them into a fun and engaging way to tell a serious story, that playfully opens people up by putting them into a tactile, kid-like emotional space. These popular pieces were distributed at the Annual Luncheon in April, and are now included in outreach packets.

Collateral

The essential print piece HELSINQI produced is the overall organization trifold brochure. This again tells the 4-part unity-in-diversity story, based on the Lives Changed campaign. We also did a set of 4 one-page info sheets, one for each of the 4 Integrated Service Areas.

Plus we did a snazzy new Presentation Folder (with a bit of a retro look, we must say), and new business cards.

Print credits:

• Leo Daedalus: concept, copywriting, design
• Anna Daedalus: concept, copywriting, project management
• Isabel Cattadoris: additional design on the Integrated Service Area brochures

Advertising

Media sponsors Portland Business Journal, 1859 Magazine and Lamar (for TriMet buses) gave the YWCA space for print and outdoor ads, which we designed, drawing again on the Lives Changed campaign.

Fundraising

Every year in April the YWCA of Greater Portland puts on its Annual Leadership Luncheon. At the 18th annual on April 20, 2010, we unveiled the Lives Changed campaign, bringing out our large-format posters, a Lives Changed slideshow, the paper Fortune Tellers, and luncheon-specific collateral including the program book and pre-event notices and invites.

Most importantly, we helped guide the messaging leading up to and during the Luncheon. Besides maintaining consistency, we brought our Integrity Marketing principles to bear and set the town for a message based not on guilt — which is, frankly, the core play for many non-profits — but on inspiration.

At 1300 luncheoneers, the turnout for the 18th Annual was a record-breaker!

Luncheon messaging credits:

• Anna Daedalus: concept, copywriting, project management
• Leo Daedalus: concept, copywriting, design
• Laurie Hotovy: design of Luncheon program book

Acknowledgments

We were very lucky to be able to work with a truly dedicated team from the YWCA of Greater Portland:

• Executive Director Eric Brown
• Marketing Director Kelly Blunt
• Board Member Peggy Kern
• Development Director Sharon Brabenac

Special thanks to all the program directors, staff, Executive Board, and clients who gave us such key input.

We are also grateful to hill² Executive Coaching & Consulting, who connected us with the YWCA. hill² were the consultants on the mission refocus in 2009, and HELSINQI had actually participated behind the scenes, designing didactic materials to help with that project. When the time came to develop the new messaging, we already had a deep understanding of the client and their new direction.

Thanks also to Scott Hall at Graphic Arts Center and Carl Perkins at Rhino Digital, who did all the great print work with phenomenal customer service.

CLIENT-RELATED NEWS

Helsinqi Hosts

Friday, 11 June 2010

Thanks to all who came to our HELSINQI Hosts networking soirée last night! We put on a special wine tasting at the Wine & Spirit Archive (WSA) for clients and associates, with a selection of "enlightened wines" put together by the WSA's Mimi Martin, and the great Pinots of Carlton Cellars.

Mimi poured three organic/biodynamic wines: Alliance, a multivarietal white by Alsatian vintner Marc Tempé; Roseena, a rosé by Oregon winery Maysara; and Il Frappato, produced entirely from Frappato grapes from Eastern Sicily by Valle dell'Acate.

Carlton Cellars' Dave Grooters & Robin Russell poured their premium Roads End and Cape Lookout Pinots, showcasing their great winemaking skills (and, incidentally, HELSINQI's great label designs, if we do say so ourselves).

The WSA also gave everyone a free ticket to any of their Friday night tastings, and a drawing prize of two tickets to one of their Passport Series of international wine classes. Mimi also brought along Beverage Marketing Consultant Ted Farthing, whom it was a pleasure to get to know.

Some of our good friends and collaborators in the YWCA of Greater Portland were there: Marketing Director Kelly Blunt (who brought our man Scott Hall of Graphic Arts Center); YWCA Board President Anne Denecke of Denecke Law (who brought along Carolyn Reynolds of Canteen Vending); YWCA Board Member Peggy Kern of MPK Marketing; and Executive Director Eric Brown, who won a photo shoot with Kathryn Elsesser in our drawing.

Kathryn Elsesser is our photographer friend who did all the photography for our Lives Changed campaign for the YWCA, as well as the pix in this very post. She also has done great event photography for Carlton Cellars. Also from the Carlton Cellars camp were Chef Paul & Kathy Parenteau, who do the amazing victuals for the Carlton Cellars vineyard lunch event series that we helped conceive and produce beginning last year.

Green CPA Brian Setzler of Trilibrium, a B Corporation, won Carlton Cellars' contribution to the drawing: a magnum of Roads End 2007. The last time we'd seen Brian was at a Trilibrium networking event where they served what must have been a jeroboam of bubbly. So now we're always going to associate Brian with oversize bottles of wine! We know what to get him for April 16th next year.

FearNoMusic's Inés Voglar and Joël Belgique made an appearance (sans instruments) and contributed a pair of concert tickets to the drawing. Our clients Laughlin-Cartrell, Inc. couldn't be there but they contributed a set of his'n'hers high-style garden/casual gloves from the new Fields & Lane line we're working on with them.

Thanks to everyone (named herein and otherwise) for helping make it a tasty and networky evening!

Posted by: Leo Daedalus on 11 June 2010 at 12:11

Tags: events, networking, wine

Categories: Carlton Cellars, Clients, Denecke Law, FearNoMusic, Fields & Lane, Helsinqi News, Portland, Wine & Spirit Archive, YWCA

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