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Building_Organizing_Your_BrandRoundtable_092025

Valerie Neumark43min

Valerie Neumark

00:02

Here we go. Welcome everyone. We're excited to have you here today to building and organizing your brand. This will be all about building some trust and clarity and connection and how to align your brand elements while everyone is coming in. I'm also going to put into the chat. It's a great time to make yourself a copy of the tool that we're going to be using today. So please do that for yourself as well. So this is hosted by rooted, and for those of you who aren't as familiar with us, we focus on connecting people and using communications as a vehicle to do that towards positive social change in our communities. And we always like to begin our work with community agreements. We want this to really feel like a place that you can share, be yourself, bring your full self. So I'll just read through these briefly, and hopefully you can pick at least one to sort of hold for yourself today. So please approach with curiosity. Be open to new ways of doing and thinking. Sit with discomfort, expect and accept non closure. Engage and be present. Practice mindful listening. Raise your virtual hand to share your thoughts and try not to multitask. We know there's lots going on for everyone, so you know, please take care of yourself and do what you need to do. Be aware of power dynamics and consider the space you consume and share space, speak from experience, assume best intent and acknowledge the impact of your words on others. Accept restraints as presented. Ideate yes and share ideas freely and openly. Embrace being messy and put aside perfectionism. I feel like this is always a really good one. What's shared here stays here, what's learned here leaves here. And be willing to slow down, notice and name what's coming up in the room. So please again, take care of yourself and have fun. And our last one that's meant to be a little bit silly, but it did happen a couple of years ago, when people were first getting used to zoom. Stay fully clothed, but no dry cleaning necessary. And then just if you can keep your mic off unless you're speaking, that would be great. And I will also take a moment in just a second, in case anybody does not have access to the chat, but we'll get to that in just a minute. Just a quick reminder of your zoom controls, in case there's anything you need to update, names, pronouns, reactions, we love those, anything along the lines, caption settings, of course. And then, as I put into the chat and many of you already are doing so. So thank you for that. Welcome. Please share your name, department, role, pronouns, where you're coming from, if you know it, or you can, you know, click the link and find that out. And any accessibility needs that you want to share via chat or vocally. I'll pause for just a minute now, in case anyone does not have access to the chat and can let us know so that we can proceed accordingly.

Valerie Neumark

03:35

Okay, great, yeah, and then just start to think about what challenges you're facing, managing your brand and its assets. That's a lot of the work we're going to be doing together today is trying to pull all these pieces together and make them easier for people to access and engage with. So again, great to see you all. Thanks for being here, and I'll keep going. Um, okay, so since I'm already talking and then I'll hand it over to soy to introduce herself, my name is Val My pronouns are she, they. I'm the Director of Strategy here at rooted. I live on alone, a land in the San Francisco East Bay, and today I am wearing a black and sort of colored sleeved shirt. I have green rimmed glasses and white skin and red hair pulled back.

Soy Krisher

04:38

Hello, I'm soy Chris. I'm rooted design director. My pronouns are she her, and I am also in the East Bay in Pinole on Hachi and land. I am Asian, American, and I'm wearing kind of a stripy shirt in a bright, lit room with plants in a bookshelf. I. Thank you.

Valerie Neumark

05:02

Alright, so here is our agenda. As you see, we're doing a little bit of who we are and welcome and setting some context. We're going to hop into some brand fundamentals and focus that around cohesion and trust, which you'll understand more in just a minute. And then the second half, we'll get into visual language and some activities around that, and have some different times for share out and Q and A, and we can also hang around a little bit if people are needing some extra time at the end. But our objectives of today are to identify some key elements of brand to evaluate your brand elements, using our framework to help figure out where things are cohesive and where there's some strengthening, where there might be things all over the place. And we're going to hopefully help you get that into one document today will be part of what we're aiming for. And then you know how to not only get these things to work together, but physically work together, but also mentally and emotionally work together. And even if you're not a strategist or a designer, we're going to give you some tools and sort of walk you through how to do this in an effective way. And then the last piece here is some practical takeaway tools that will hopefully help you and help your team into the future. So hopefully people saw the pre work. If you didn't get to it, that's okay. You'll have some time to do it today as well. Just going to paste this into the chat so that while we're talking, you can also be gathering things from your website, strategic plan, any documents, really, just trying to give you a chance to actually do this outside of your normal work day, which I know can just be hard to find the time for these kinds of things. So hopefully you'll walk away with, you know, some some packaging for yourself. So quick introduction into some brand fundamentals, and I'm just going to start here on this screen. We're not expecting you to be starting from scratch. We're assuming that you already have some brand elements, like mission, vision, values, audiences, things along those lines. And if you don't have them, then just like, do your best to quickly scratch something together for yourself, so that you have something to work with and build off of into the future. We're not going to focus on like assessing those pieces. It's more going to be about how they're working together, and if it's feeling cohesive and enable for other people to work with them as well. So like I said, the first half of the session, I'll be sort of talking through this immersion and strategy area, talking about where these elements are, how they work together, what might need to get refined or adjusted, and then the second half of the session. So I will take you through the concept and refinement pillars, and that will all hopefully help you build out some guidelines so that you can implement all this stuff with your team, and you know, ultimately that all leads out to your community. So I'm just going to paste that again for anyone who came a little bit later, so that you make sure you have the tool to work with. So into why brand is important, I'll sort of go through this kind of more quickly, because you're obviously here and know that it's important, but it really is about building cohesion, both internally and externally. So as it says here on the slide, externally, it's your global identity, it's your why, and internally, it can really help build operational capacity and galvanize support. So it's people understanding who you are, what you do, from an internal perspective is so important and essential to all of this. And you know, when we're thinking about brand and the values, mission and vision and community and all those aspects being there in the center, we really need to also think about how we're leveraging, how we're positioning ourselves, and then how that's building additional reputation and all what we find so much of the time is that people are focused on the reputation part and not necessarily focused on some of these other areas, and that that is what ends up sort of lacking in the cohesion and trust. So that's why we're going to start with the cohesion and trust. But before we do that, I just want to also tee up a little bit of additional framing for this. So if you're not familiar with the liberatory design process, now is a really good time. Time to take a look. I'll put the link to the deck into our chat. But it's really an important lens to approach this kind of work, whether you're a designer or not. It's really gives you a chance to use a more equity centered lens approach to how you're thinking about design work and how you're thinking about your brand. And so in the beginning of the laboratory design process, we're we think about seeing the system and spending time noticing and reflecting in order, not just to help our communities, but in increase our own self awareness of our identities, beliefs, biases and values, and how that can sort of work in partnership and be more ultimately liberating for us all, so we can make better connections about who we are and who we're designing with. And oftentimes because as designers or as the communications people, executive directors, whatever role you are within your organization, that carries a lot of power in how you're interacting and sharing out your brand and your brand promise to your community. So the I, as I said, I'm not going to have us do a huge reflection, or, you know, go through a lot of the laboratory design process today, but I did want to bring forward this particular slide, because as sia and I were talking about this work, we just kept coming back to the cohesion and trust part of the brand information I showed you previously, and that building this relational trust, really investing in relationships is the key to all of this. It's the key to your brand, cultivating a culture that really is inviting dialog and, you know, collective sense making where you're honoring stories, experiencing, making time and space for people to really be able to bring forward their fuller selves through how they're connecting to your brand. And that might seem sort of like high level conceptual and you're in the trenches, but it's a really important aspect of how people are truly connecting to the why of your organization. Oh, here we go into the cohesion and trust. What does this actually mean? So we'll just take one minute to just think for a second about what cohesion and trust means to you. Hopefully we've given you a little bit of context of how we're thinking about it. But let's just take one moment, and then I'll get into our case study. And if you'd like to share into the chat what it means to you, That would be great, too. Yeah,

Valerie Neumark

13:42

okay, so again, if you haven't made yourself a copy of our tool yet, please do so. And just to give you a little bit of context for the example that's going to be following along with us, so that you can sort of see our thinking around this and then be able to reproduce it for yourselves. We're using an anonymized case study the environment Alliance, and it's a case study that's sort of pulling from a couple of our different clients. But again, if you don't have a specific organization that you're working with, maybe you're a consultant, or you're, you know, in between things, or whatever that is, then I would just pick a client or pick an organization that you can use as as the example for yourself, just so that you can work through the process and have an example when you need it in future. So the first piece here that we're going to be talking through is the what we do, and just pulling your mission, and if your mission needs some tweaks, you can also always, you know, just kind of tweak it to what you want it to be, or come up with your own piece. And we'll give you a few minutes. Uh, after I go through the different sections that you're going to need to have here at the end, so you can have some time to pull them together and think more deeply about them. But for now, you know, find the mission. Pull it into the slide deck is a great place to begin. Then going into the why we do it. So your purpose, your vision, where, what is the vision of the organization going into the future? That's the, really, the next slide that you're going to want. And if we're thinking back to those original, the brand process pieces, this is really your immersion again, your immersion and your strategy. What are the pieces of the brand that need to be there for people to understand? Sometimes, what I like to have is both the vision and then a little bit of explanatory text that goes with it that gives more of the like, implicit information about the vision, because it's so easy to just sort of like, regurgitate what's there. But in order to really connect with an audience, connect with someone else in your community, they want to hear what the why is, what's the why of that vision, what really is going to move their hearts. So the next piece here are any sort of behaviors or values, the how we do it. We do it through these various things, in this case, building power for systemic change, evidence based solutions for the planet, collaborative relationships, coalition building and partnerships and making transformative, long term impacts. And a lot of that, again, can feel very conceptual, high level, and what does that really mean? So having additional information for your team, for your community, so they really can understand what those values mean in action is, you know, extra important. Then the next slide in here is audiences. So put your list of key audiences, and I would put them in order of priority. We always want to be thinking about the community members, those most impacted by our work, The Who are the people that we even exist in the first place. So from rooted perspective, we push the donors down, the funders down a little bit. But try to be honest with yourself as well, especially in these times, we know how complicated and difficult some of these things are, so thinking through your key audience list is another important piece to have. So often we'll see organizations where there isn't a cohesive understanding of who the key audiences are of the organization. And so this is another important slide to have in your in your group of resources here, and then the last one here are your key goals, again, trying to put them in order of priority. What are the things that your organization is doing? Sometimes we'll have the this will come about or be seen in a theory of change, sometimes in some kind of logic model or your strategic plan. But there's often key goals around somewhere. So if you don't have any, think about what your you think your organization is wanting to accomplish in the next one, three and five years.

Valerie Neumark

18:33

And like you see here, I would try to make sure you have at least four that will just be helpful both for yourself and for the rest of your organization. So there's our little overview. Now it'll be time for you to gather your brand elements and fill in these slides into our tool. And then we have a couple of questions for you to reflect upon. So thinking about, are there elements that are missing or incomplete? Is your internal team familiar with these elements of your brand? Do they know where to find them or how to use them in their work? And then last, what would be helpful to you to change in order to build deeper brand alignment within your team? So we'll just give you, I don't know, maybe eight minutes or so to gather all of the elements, get them into the slides, and then just reflect, and we'll have a little share out. So please be ready with after you know you're gathering everything, one sort of thought, reflection or answer to one of these questions to be able to share with the larger group so we can chat a little bit, and then we'll move into our next section. Any questions. Okay, how was that for everyone? I know it's not a huge amount of time, but hopefully it was enough to at least get you started a little bit. So. Does anyone have any thoughts or reflections that they would like to share? Let me put my video back on.

Speaker 1

20:11

I can share. My name is Marina, and I work at the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland, Oregon, and we're a fairly large organization. We have over 170 staff, and so what we find is, you know, I don't have the capacity as the sole person on our communications team to support with branding. A lot of our staff are kind of doing things on their own, and so it's helping me to reflect on how I can create something that might be more accessible to everyone, because I don't think currently, everyone is familiar enough to be doing their own pieces. And you know, that's to be expected when when you're this big. So I'm trying to think about those systems, and this is really amazing timing, because we're launching our new website on Monday. And so it gives me some opportunities to consider new tools like SharePoint, where we can put logos that'll be easy to download, and then I want it to have a corresponding like style guide that's really simple to follow, and so this is really helping me think about how to condense this, you know, now, 51 year history into something that feels easy for our staff be able to navigate Great.

Valerie Neumark

21:40

Thank you so much, and congrats on your website launch. That's always quite a feat

Speaker 2

21:47

I can share. My name is Jen. I'm the Communications Director at if, when, how, lawyering for Reproductive Justice. She her pronouns. I work with a ton of lawyers, as you can see, in our name, and they loved, they love to define words and to really focus on what words mean to us and to and to them. And we just did our strategic planning process, which was which took two years. So I was looking at this, and I'm like, wow, I actually do have values and goals, and the thing that we did not do is audiences, because our programs are really siloed, and so it's just bringing up that like we really need to do some deep thinking about audiences and prioritize them as a whole organization, rather just on teams.

Valerie Neumark

22:44

Yeah, thank you. All right, so we always like to take a moment to look away from your screen. Stretch anything that feels good to you. If you have a window, please try to look outside. And it's nice rest for your eyes. And I still do this one that you talked about a while back, soy that always feels really good on my neck and clears my head.

Soy Krisher

23:14

Here we're going to be talking about brand elements. You know, as a strategist, Val is doing all of the research and consolidating your brand strategy, and by the time all of those findings come to me, as a designer, I start thinking about visual elements. But I wanted to discuss that it's not just about only the visuals when we're talking about branding, so and then in this, in this next slides, we're going to be somewhere in between concept and refinement. Just to reiterate, this is our general branding process, and Val's portion is usually the immersion and the strategy. My portion comes with concept and refinement, and mostly it's visual, but we're going to be trying to think about brand holistically. So I want it to open up more than just these visual elements.

Soy Krisher

24:23

Okay, so I want to start by sharing where this chart comes from. This isn't something we invented here at rooted. It's a tool created by lovework Studios, which is a for profit creative agency for a branding curriculum through future London Academy. I took this years ago, but I still use this chart behind the scenes with our clients as a way to kind of step back and look at branding holistically to see how all the different pieces that we're making work together. Because when most people think about branding, they think about. Well, yes, the logo or maybe the color palette, but a brand is much more than that. It's like the entire experience people have with your organization, whether that's something like reading a fundraising appeal or attending one of your events, or even just visiting your website. So this chart helps us look at branding in a more holistic way, and you can see it in the inner circle or the second circle. It's dividing brand elements into four dimensions, visual, verbal, sensory and interactive, and each dimension kind of reinforces the others so that your brand feels more consistent and authentic. So I'm going to quickly walk through each one before we go to our exercise. But for the visual, Oh, can you go back one? Yeah, for the visual section, you can see there's like, logo, color type, face imagery, layout, things like this. So we're at here. We're asking, do our visuals reflect our mission? Do they reflect our community, our values? For example, if we say we serve diverse communities and our images only represent one type of person, you'll see a disconnect for verbal. We're talking about what Val was, discussing things like messaging, tone of voice, your values, your manifesto. So you're asking yourself, do our words feel consistent across all media that could be a grant proposal, it could be a social media post, things like this for sensory this is something that's often overlooked, but it matters. These are things like materials, patterns, sound, music, these things all can create like an emotional experience, and you might not be using them right away, but it's good to be able to define those things so that they all work together. For instance, if you're creating a campaign video, does the music inspire hope, or does it inspire urgency or action? And interactive also sometimes overlook this. This would include animation, interactive elements, motion principles for nonprofits, that could be something like how your website welcomes visitors, or how social posts create engagement, things like this. So we're asking ourselves, does every interaction reflect our values or our mission? And for the purpose of this exercise, we're just going to choose one from each category that I've circled in green, because we could literally spend like three weeks just on examining one section, and you might not finish. It's just a way to get started, because a logo I almost didn't want to choose logo because it's so huge, but I think it's important, and it might help you get started assessing so we can move on to The exercise now, okay, this is a brand cohesion exercise, and the goal here is to look at your brand, not to look at separate pieces of your brand, but think about them as like a whole connected system. Because your brand, you're going to want everything that your logo, your tone of voice, the way you sound, how things move to all reinforce one another. And that's what we're doing here it's you're reflecting on these different dimensions, an element from each of the dimensions. Here we have the logo, tone of voice, a sound or a motion and emotion. So we'll ask you to consider if what your logo communicates visually, how your tone of voice feels verbally, what kind of sound might represent your organization, and perhaps what kind of motion reflects your personality and values. And at the end, when you have all of these defined and there are some questions that will help you do some assessment, we'll step back and ask, do. These elements feel aligned with our mission and values. Do they complement one another, or do they clash? And if there are inconsistencies, how can you refine them? So think about this less as a design critique when you're thinking about your logo, and more as a chance to check how your brand is aligned, like you might not be.

Soy Krisher

30:34

You might not be assessing it as a graphic design assignment. More, does it work with our mission.

Speaker 3

30:46

Oh, sorry. Is this okay? If I can interject and ask my question, sure, sure. So I hope I'm not jumping to go when I ask this. So I know with our brand, we pretty much have kind of run the gamut of just like getting our branding and stuff like that together. But one of the things that I struggle with is because people have different emotions when it comes to, like different words, and so I kind of struggle with finalizing our brand and just kind of like the tone is always a hard thing for us to kind of like narrow in on, because, you know, certain words, it can mean something totally different to somebody else, even though we all have an agreed upon definition. So, yeah, I've I'm wondering if you have, like, any pointers you can provide on that.

Soy Krisher

31:38

I think something that that Val often does at Val and Mabel, our UX person, is you have to bounce it off of your audiences and do some user testing and see how people respond. And that can give you a greater sense of what your audience how your audience are responding, versus like how your team personally feels about these words, and that can sometimes help you come come up with more of a a well backed up decision, versus, like a personal opinion, that can be really tough.

Unknown Speaker

32:18

Okay, thank you, Val.

Soy Krisher

32:22

I don't know if you have any suggestions as to like, how to run those tests.

Valerie Neumark

32:29

I mean, I think it, it's so dependent on the community. So I, you know, want to hear more about your specific communities, and you know what sort of areas of tension or inequities might be existing that are needing to be at least accounted for. But oftentimes, there's sort of three different groups of things that we'll do. One is, you know, surveys, but if people aren't feeling close enough to the organization, then they might not want to take a survey, or they'll feel like the survey itself is, you know, asking them questions that they're not actually going to do anything about. So it can it's a very much a relational type of question, versus finding people to participate in a focus group, or even specifically into, like, one on one interviews, where it's people that are specific roles or profiles within your community, but at the end of the day, it really just depends on if leadership is going to listen to that feedback with I'm not necessarily saying that in The nicest way, but, you know, really understanding what the power dynamics are within your community. And that's why, at the beginning, I was sort of using the the laboratory design process of, you know, taking a moment to see the system and see what biases and identities and power dynamics and feelings are present, and once those have all been sort of acknowledged by everyone, then you can sort of figure out how to get the information that you need. But that's, you know, there's so many steps in that depending on the culture of your organization.

Valerie Neumark

34:32

Yeah, Allie, exactly what Allie said, research can really help sway leadership. All

Soy Krisher

34:43

uh, Val, can you share the example answers? Yes, let me

Valerie Neumark

34:48

switch Hold on, because it's not, yeah, it's not in this one. Hold on one second. Let me switch you.

Speaker 1

34:54

Pull this one in. There we go. Okay.

Soy Krisher

35:00

Here are just some, you know, sample answers. I because it was a sample. I didn't choose logo because it was like a fictitious, anonymous combination of clients. So I just chose color palette for visual and you can see how we've defined these things, and I can't remember who was talking about trying to build a style guide, but these types of things can help you. These answers will help you consolidate ideas for your style guide as well.

Valerie Neumark

35:43

It. So maybe we can give everyone another five minutes or so. I'll put back on the little bit of music, and then we can do a share out. And we have one other quick tool just to share, and you'll see it as the last slide in your tool. But I want to explain the landscape analysis real quick, or landscape flower, and then if, in the off chance anyone needs to leave early, I'm just going to paste the survey into the chat. And we just always really appreciate anybody's feedback, and we're going to be doing a community survey in the next couple of weeks to get a better sense of what people are needing for 2026 but for now, take another five minutes to gather your stuff. We'll do a little share out. Would anyone, if anyone is feeling like they'd really like to share, or if there's any thoughts you'd like to share into the chat, but we'll just give a minute. In case anyone would like to share any thoughts or challenges or questions.

Speaker 4

36:49

I can go real quick. Hi, Val, hi. My name is Liz. I am newly self employed, so I have, on the one hand, a certain amount of experience, and on the other hand, I'm starting from the very beginning. So we don't actually have, like, we've barely chosen a name and I but I have had to look at a lot of templates recently, Canva, YouTube, Twitch, a lot of these online services, and I realized how many of them blinked, flashed and banged at me that I really didn't like. And so I tried for this exercise flipping it to think, Okay, well, what's the opposite of that then? And the idea of a flowing motion and an upward motion, as opposed to going sort of backwards motion. And I was thinking, one of the templates that I was looking at, thinking, All I would have to do would be to flip the image and I would get what I wanted out of it. And I I I really like, I was like, oh, okay, that's cool. That's cool. I love being able to play with things that way.

Speaker 3

38:10

I'm curious

Soy Krisher

38:11

how anyone assess their logo. I mean, as a designer, I'm always really curious if there's anyone who'd be willing to share I would really love to hear it.

Speaker 3

38:26

I can talk a bit about ours.

Soy Krisher

38:29

I'd love that.

Unknown Speaker

38:31

Yeah,

Speaker 3

38:33

I don't how would I be able to share it? So we should I paste it on? Can? Can we do that piece? Paste or share your

Valerie Neumark

38:47

screen, if you'd like, whichever.

Speaker 3

38:55

So this is ours, and I think it's very busy, and it doesn't convert well for small screens or like small dimensions. And so I think the bridge is very important because it's it's a bridge very significant in our community, and the roots are very important too. But I just think the idea is too complicated, and it, in my opinion, it doesn't translate well with what exactly we are doing. It can be misinterpreted. But I I know we worked with someone from the community to design it, so that's why they have decided to keep it on. But we have had recent conversations about, do we want to keep it on, or do we not want to keep it on,

Soy Krisher

39:56

or maybe even keeping parts of. It and simplifying it or something like that.

Speaker 1

40:03

Yeah, cool.

Speaker 3

40:06

Thank you. Thank you.

Valerie Neumark

40:12

Right? I know we're at time, so if anybody needs to hop, please feel free. If anyone wants to stay for the extra couple minutes, then please do we will stick around. I'm going to put the survey into the chat again, just for good measure. And I just wanted to share quickly this landscape flower, homework exercise. It's that last slide in the tool, but essentially how you approach it is reviewing the how we do it and key goals and and then pull five to seven competitors, partners, and sort of ideate for yourself, five similarities, five differences, and then that, sort of combining those helps you come up with what the axes are. And so for this particular, you know, fake organization, they have coalition building, opposite to policy research, local to international, and sort of thinking about where these other organizations sit within that landscape, with themselves in the middle. And it just sort of helps you think about that positioning, where people oftentimes they don't necessarily, I mean. And this helps your team also, especially you'll see in the example we shared, like all of them link to the websites, and so then it helps other people on your team say, Oh, this is the landscape we're sitting in. These are these other organizations and the ones that are sort of closest to us. Sometimes we can then go look at them and see how they're framing something, how they're talking about their work, if we're struggling to figure out how to share something. And sometimes you also find that, you know, there's areas where you're super unique, and then you can really push that more and say, Oh, this like international policy research area, there aren't that many people doing that kind of work. That might be our kind of unique value add. So that's how this landscape flower really helps. It's a really good, good kind of tool to to push yourself with that a little bit. So again, if you can share any feedback, any thoughts, we would love to hear from you. And the last piece here, we're also happy to do brand consultations and soy and I can take a look at your your work, at you know, whatever homework you put together from today's session, we're always happy to take some time and talk through these things we know oftentimes comms people are kind of alone in their organizations, so feel free to have us be a thought partner and community member for you. And so then, in closing, if you want to share any thoughts into the chat about today's session before you head out, we would very much appreciate that, and like I said, we'll stick around if people want to work on any pieces for a few minutes or ask questions or have very specific things that you'd like us to look at or talk to you about this.

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