Family Journeys work with children, young people and their families across Edinburgh and Lothians. They prioritise the child’s voice, creating emotionally safe spaces for diverse families to heal and thrive by providing access to the tools and advice they need to navigate challenges times such as separation, conflict and change.
The Challenge
First established in 1981 as Family Mediation Lothian, their services have grown from mediation to providing family connections centres, children’s groups and support for parenting apart. To reflect this growth, they rebranded their name to Family Journeys in 2020.
Three years after their name change, they realised that their branded assets and digital touchpoints did not convey the depth and breadth of their services. Nor did it resonate with staff or service users. Additionally, their current tools and templates were causing unnecessary administrative effort as they were off-brand, hard-to-use, and govern.
Border Crossing UX were engaged to help Family Journeys:
- Co-design their brand strategy with their team to ensure it reflected who they are as an organisation and inspire them in their daily roles.
- Develop a new visual identity that would be easy to implement, govern and will resonate with their service users, as well as their staff.
- Design a new set of digital assets that are accessible, usable and simple to administer.
- Develop a suite of branded assets and templates that enable team members simply create branded documents, presentations, images and videos.
- Create a marketing plan that was realistic for them to deliver without removing focus from their important work with families.
Solution
Following a review of their current brand, digital touchpoints and documents, we worked with the senior management team to establish the pain points they experienced when using their current brand, touchpoints and assets, as well as where there were opportunities to help them with efficiencies across their operations. It was clear that not only was the brand not working from a look and feel perspective, their assets and touchpoints were difficult to use.
This meant that they were spending substantial amounts of time manually creating or governing things. It was also difficult for service users including children, parents and solicitors to find information online or contact them digitally. Overall, this resulted in poor experiences filled with unnecessary friction.
This review allowed us to create a design brief with a consolidated and prioritised set of design challenges and desired outcomes for the programme of work.
Once we had established a strong understanding of the current state, we facilitated a collaborative design workshop at their team away day. This workshop took the whole team through a series of exercises to discover what the true essence and value of Family Journeys could be. Through this workshop, and following prioritisation sessions, we were able to create a brand strategy that felt authentic to the whole organisation.
During the workshop, the organisation’s commitment to professionalism, inclusivity, and a trauma-informed approach was strongly represented through-out the exercises. The outputs and insights allowed us to create their revised vision, mission, and values. These were then used to create a strong tagline, value proposition and profile that are the cornerstone of the brand.
Now the strategy was in place we could start designing and developing the new brand guidelines, assets and digital touchpoints. Starting with the visual mark, we used this to validate that we had a real understanding of the organisation. We took three routes looking at distinct aspects of their brand: safe spaces, navigation routes and the balancing of families and emotions. We investigated these three routes and put together example branded assets so that the Family Journeys team could decide based on the context of use of the logo as opposed to just the logo itself. The Family Journeys team reviewed all three options and decided to use the balance theme. We were delighted by this choice, as although objectively all three options were valid our whole team had a strong subjective preference for the balanced theme.
Next, we looked at the ideal user journeys for both the service users and the internal teams. Understanding that the volume of contacts they received over the phone was causing the team a lot of administrative effort meant that a core goal of all online touchpoints was to provide digital contact channels that could be more easily managed and responded to. Additionally, we knew that the site was catering for four primary user types:
- Children and young people;
- Parents and caregivers;
- Childcare professionals; and
- Solicitors.
Therefore, we created a site map with multiple entry points for each user type and clear routes for each distinct journey. Once we had mapped these key journeys across channels, we were able to create a draft navigation and wireframes of the different website pages.
With the brand strategy, look and feel and information architecture in place we were able to start work on the branded assets including:
- A new wordpress.com website that is easy to use, accessible and secure.
- A new set of social media and charitable giving channels.
- A suite of Microsoft Office branded templates that would allow the production of consistent, user-friendly documents, images and assets for both print and online.
- Video assets.
- Updated branded brochures, contracts and resources for parents and children.
Services delivered:
- Expert review
- Collaborative design
- Brand strategy
- Brand identity
- User experience strategy
- User journey and empathy mapping
- Product and service design
- Content and creative
Key outputs:
- Brand canvas
- Brand guidelines
- User journeys and sitemap
- Branded Microsoft templates
- Training and guidance documentation.
- WordPress.com website and branded social media channels
The impact:
The new assets are now all in place and following their training session the team are already seeing efficiency gains. Additionally, the optimised digital channels and contact forms are allowing parents and solicitors to contact them as and when they need to, not just during opening hours. We look forward to being able to measure the impact of this fabulous brand project over the next 12 months, and beyond.
What our clients and partners think
“For small independent charities to be offered this level of generosity is of enormous value and we would publicly like to express our most sincere thanks for the respect shown to us throughout the process. Thank you, Esther, Francois, Scott, Calum, Rebecca and Catherine.”Jane Denmark – Co-CEO, Family Journeys
Want to know more?
For more information about Family Journeys look at their website. There are loads of ways to support them from volunteering time, to fundraising or even donating through online shopping.
To learn more about the project and how we can help you create the authentic brand you deserve contact Esther today.
