Below: Before and After Images in Slide Show, Video, Summary, Credits
Too many consultancies like to strategize and bolt, leaving execution to the client. But when they started in 2009, American Philanthropic sought to change consulting for the better, by rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard work of helping their nonprofit clients execute the practical advice they offered.
American Philanthropic was growing rapidly, pursuing some of North America’s biggest nonprofit organizations and trying to hire to keep up with their growth. But while the organization was landing clients and filling up with talent, their bulky name and outdated brand wasn’t able to keep up and was becoming a hurdle. We were tasked with taking the highly-intellectual and deep-thinking American Philanthropic leadership team through our branding process to define their brand identity, recommend a more streamlined brand name, and build an authentic visual identity to bind everything together.
The rebrand centered around American Philanthropic’s core purpose and tagline: to strengthen civil society. Our job was to help them define, in the simplest terms, how and why they did that. Through a set of foundational core values and unique personality traits, the brand finally came to life both for their internal team and longtime clients. The newly-defined brand led us to recommend an abridged version of the firm’s name, shortening it to AmPhil. The firm’s logo went from an overly-complicated, royalty-free image to a fully-custom wordmark that matched AmPhil’s simple sophistication.
Phase one was the internal brand launch, which was a huge success. Their team of over 100 employees was excited and couldn’t wait to use the new brand identity in their daily workflows. Phase two was putting the brand to work in pursuing new and existing clients. Having a solid brand identity foundation allowed AmPhil to know exactly what organizations they wanted to work with and put all their efforts into pursuing the right relationships.
