Village Care International: Positioning a non-profit for greatness

Putting a big idea into words

Village Care International is an organization with world-changing ideas about how to lift African orphans and widows out of impoverishment. Their issue? When Denver-based advertising agency, LeeReedy, originally met them, Village Care couldn’t verbalize their groundbreaking ideas in a clear, compelling, way to pitch their two key audiences – corporations and volunteers.

Extracting the brand characteristics

Though counterintuitive (and counter to the majority of non-profits), Village Care’s answer to the suffering in Africa is not in sending more financial aid to the region. Their answer lies in giving Africans something infinitely more valuable: Knowledge.

Village Care was created by and follows in the vision of an extremely successful businessman. As such, they apply proven business strategies to African communities. Instead of trying, like most non-profits, to solve a single issue causing distress in a community, Village Care International studies a village on a comprehensive level and affects it holistically with recommendations – using the same all-encompassing model that would successfully affect change inside a business. Then, they let the Africans make the changes themselves, and learn how to evolve away from poverty.

Boiling down to the brand essence

At its core, these were the distinctive characteristics we uncovered during our half-day Clear Vision brand discovery workshop with Village Care. The next step was to refine, capturing their entire essence in one statement:

Village Care helps African communities find the answers within themselves.

Village Care, along with other clients who have been through LeeReedy’s brand essence definition process, appreciated the speed and accuracy in which we achieved this end result – with the top people within the organization actually being able to afford the time to get involved in the process. After all, whose vision is it more important to capture in defining a brand’s positioning?

Building out the brand’s identity

From this single, agreed upon brand positioning statement, we began crafting the look and voice of Village Care through a corporate brochure. Since Village Care’s philosophy differed so much from other non-profits focused on Africa, it was mandatory that their brand identity also set them far apart.

We began by shifting away from photos of starving children and instead told our story metaphorically through illustration. Where we did use photos, we focused on the positive, the change Village Care spurred. In copy, we were punchy, honest and proved with facts how outdated and problematic the current non-profit model is.  

The result was a world-changing idea brought into sharp focus. Can we solve your product’s muddled positioning with our brand management and brand strategy consulting? Let me tell you how kreedy@leereedy.com.