Pilotlight chief executive Ed Mayo talks about the organisation’s rebranding.
As a voluntary sector leader, I thought I had done rebranding before. It turns out I was just changing logos.
I joined Pilotlight in the summer of 2020. The charity, which provides organisation development support for small frontline charities, is twenty five years old this year. Our brand had been designed to talk to business and charity, but both had moved on. What had seemed professional now came across as cold.
The prompt for a rebrand was a new ten-year strategy for the charity. Under the theme of ‘systems change’, our goal had widened from making a success of our own pro bono programmes to collaborating to make the whole field of pro bono work better for both charities and skilled volunteers.
The brand review started in January 2021 and for six months we worked on our own. We wanted to develop as much of the brand architecture as we could, then to have a clear and cost-effective brief for a branding agency. We ran research early on which confirmed that our branding was not helping our core business. One comment on our logo was:
“Does the yellow scrawl represent chaos? – because if it does it has got it exactly right as that is what most charities are in! But I don’t like it.”
We did explore whether to change our name. To test this, we asked staff, business and charity partners to ask friends of theirs, who didn’t know us, what associations the word ‘Pilotlight’ had for them and if Pilotlight was an organisation, what would it do? While there were a fair number of ‘gas boilers’ in the answers, there were also more positive answers of being a catalyst, ignition, guiding and shining a light.
For the preparatory work in-house, we used the ‘BOSCARD’ framework for planning the brand review and the Brand Key model for building the brand. This included all the usual creative exercises – if we were a car, we would be an electric Mini, for example.
We then went to look for a brand agency. The ACEVO supplier directory is excellent and we did also look at industry award winners as well as some word of mouth introductions. We wanted brand strategy to be a core strength. We met with agencies that talked brand but were really just about design. They would have given us a new logo and at lower cost, but after the fun of a relaunch, this option would not have taken us forward.
In June 2021, we appointed lukecharles. A small agency, they had a great reference in the work that they had done for Royal British Legion, cleaning up a confused brand with a logo and visual architecture that put the poppy at the heart of their identity.
Other charities that are doing rebranding this year have their own recommendations through the ACEVO Community Board – Joanne Byrne of Anorexia Bulimia Care recommends JG Creative, Steven Wibberley of Cruse Bereavement Support recommends Red Stone, Claire Bennett of Positive Action in the Community is using a local agency Get Stoked, while Isik Oguzertem of Refugee Action Kingston recommends Hat-trick Design. Vicky Browning tells the story of how ACEVO itself rebranded in 2019.
When I shared the news in public of starting the rebrand, the first comment was perhaps predictable: surely all our money should simply be going to frontline support. So, no marketing, no infrastructure… perhaps no charity leader.
Well, the brand helps us grow what we can do. Pilotlight is unusual as we are a capacity-building charity with a social enterprise business model. The costs of our programmes, which are free to charities, are met by our business partners and individuals, the same people who also give their time and skills.
After introductory workshops, the agency focused on options to define the brand essence. From six creative options, we moved quickly to one that set out the difference we make to each of our key audiences – that we exist to amplify the impact that charities, businesses and individuals can bring to the world.
With this in play, lukecharles moved to the visual treatment, including the logo, which we tested to ensure that it would work well in a collaborative setting too, with other charity and business logos.
The new brand is far more than a look though, aligning everything that we do. We have updated our values in line with the brand, changed the names of our core programmes to simplify our offer to businesses and charities and run through training for all staff on how to use the new brand tools.
I think I have changed the logo five times in different non-profits that I have run as a leader, in each case updating the design and visual identity. There can be power in doing so, but at none of these points, did I realise the full power and potential of rebranding. This is to bring all that an organisation does into a simple and compelling focus.
Branding recalls for me the advice of Jean Monet, the founder of the European Union – ‘never underestimate the power of an idea expressed simply and repeated frequently’.
