iDonate Brand Refresh and Website Redesign
Client: iDonate
Role: Content Strategist, Brand Author, and Copywriter
Timeline: 3 months
Deliverables: iDonate content mood board (thought leadership deck), brand guidelines (tone of voice), and refreshed website content (currently in development and staging only, as of July 2019).
Project summary: As a seasoned leader in donation processing technology, iDonate needed to update their brand to match their in-market experience and veteran status in the industry. Brand awareness was decent, but potential customers weren’t always versed in the spectrum of iDonate’s offerings and expertise. Beginning with the delivery of a brand dialect playbook, we initialized a light brand refresh for iDonate that ultimately led to a thorough website overhaul from both visual and messaging perspectives.
Giving as a percent of the American GDP is at 2.1% – a percentage that hasn’t changed since World War I. How can we drive people to give by improving the experience of generosity?
iDonate believes that generosity is an integral part of the human experience. And by offering a superior donation processing platform that features both front-end and back-end solutions, iDonate certainly made a unique space for themselves in the generosity industry. However, a company with such a wide spectrum of offerings faced challenges in messaging, often muddling its mission in product-speak and a honed focus on solutions rather than consumer problems and possibilities.
The ask: Help iDonate tell their story.
When we first met with Ray Gary, the CEO of iDonate, our mission was clear. iDonate had gone through many different iterations of sales cycles throughout its decade of existence — informed by research compiled from a previous engagement with Accomplice — but in the process had allowed its story as a brand and mission fall to the wayside. iDonate needed a way to weave a compelling narrative that joined a noble cause (increasing rates of generosity and revenue for causes through innovative technology) with amazing product features without forsaking iDonate’s key driver: heart.
This project involved two asks. The first: author a guide to the iDonate voice that maintained the same passion for people that Ray did. The second: utilize that guide to refresh iDonate’s website and assist in marketing efforts to grow iDonate’s own revenue this year.
The first step: Mood boards don’t have to be visual.
We conducted stakeholder interviews with key figures at iDonate to gauge the parameters of the brand’s story upon outset. But we quickly found that iDonate’s existing brand story maintained a focus that wasn’t about the people – it was about the software.
iDonate’s website wasn’t much different. Product features and uses in bold, punchy content bogged down the heart of the brand’s people-centric mission and motivation to the point of being nearly undetectable on the site.
To combat this, we began to evaluate iDonate’s core strengths as a brand. We isolated a few of them to use as springboards moving forward:
Though iDonate’s customers are nonprofits and mission-centric organizations, they have developed superior products because they know donors better than anyone else. (This presented an interesting B2B versus B2C target audience conflict, but was important to identify.)
iDonate’s customers value their partnership with the brand because of their personal, service-minded approach to technology and donation processing. One customer referred to their experience working with iDonate as one similar to a family business, in terms of iDonate’s flexibility, friendliness, and communication.
Above all else, iDonate strives to make the world a better place by enabling causes to achieve their missions better.
I drafted a thought leadership deck to gauge Ray’s reaction to a brand voice direction that shifted toward a warmer and more personal approach. This would be presented in a manner similar to a visual mood board: we asked iDonate to identify phrases and tonalities that particularly resonated with them to begin real drafting brand content.
Once we received sign-off, we could move forward with a competitive analysis and market research that would ultimately inform our recommendations toward authoring iDonate’s new brand voice.
The second step: Writing the brand voice.
Ray aspired to develop iDonate’s story in a tone similar to his own. The reason for this was hardly despotic: Ray led the company with a relentless fervor for supporting world-changing missions and truly doing superior work. And since iDonate had been in the game for 11 years, he expected the new voice to reflect that expertise.
A few dimensions of voice we captured early on that ultimately did make it into the iDonate dialect playbook were:
We’re built with (and from) enterprising people. Historically, iDonate’s culture has been very healthy in its mission-mindedness. Our work contributes to good.
We are aggressively mission-minded, and those words were selected with intention.
We frame our work around impacts and outcomes, not blank checks to institutions.
Let’s go solve a problem, and let’s focus on an outcome, not evergreen giving.
“We should speak in a way that reflects Enneagram Type 8.”
When we completed the playbook, we had two audiences in mind. The first was iDonate’s internal team. We authored the new iDonate voice to serve as a guide to how the brand might describe itself to others, but also as a way to self-reflectively rally around the highlights of the iDonate culture and all the dimensions of what makes it great. And the second audience was JDA, a marketing firm that would be working with iDonate to drive customers through a variety of campaigns.
The refresh: Iteration through design.
Once we received the green light from Ray, we jumped into developing iDonate’s voice in context through a website overhaul. I worked with our senior designer to establish visual elements early on that reflected the pillars we’d established for the iDonate brand.
After design showed mood boards and landed on a direction for the website’s visual personality, I began working in tandem to tell the iDonate story through the perspective of information architecture. We opted for an approach that brought iDonate’s impact pillar to the forefront of the brand’s story — all without sacrificing language that would assist in satisfying marketing KPIs, such as lifting a cause’s revenue.
Finally, we sorted applications of the iDonate product suite — naming it the Impact Suite along the way — by industry and by specific use case, even creating a personalization tool to walk users through the product suite in a highly curated, impact-driven experience, assembled just for them.
