Your views on SDC's re-branding
On August 27th, we sent you an email asking for your views on SDC’s rebranding. We were overwhelmed by the response and would like to extend our thanks to everyone who took part. Within an hour of the survey being sent we’d had 300 responses, by the end of two weeks, we’d had over 800. The strength of feeling you demonstrated – both positive and negative – amazed us. The information below explains a bit more about the re-branding exercise and summarises some of your comments.
Why are we rebranding?
When the SDC was set up in 2000 the issue of sustainable development was just beginning to gain recognition in government. Today many of the issues that feed into sustainable development are frequently in the public eye, and government departments are familiar with the agenda.
SDC’s original brand was appropriate for the type of organisations out of which it grew. Now, with a more prominent face in government and the SD community, and a more public face through its watchdog role, the brand is falling behind the task at hand. The rebranding will help bring together the broad strands of work that the SDC now does and will help establish the sustainable development agenda with our growing target audiences.
We’d like to allay the concerns of some respondents to the survey and make it clear that no pressure from government, or any other outside organisation, was brought to bear upon the SDC in deciding on the re-brand.
How are we doing the re-branding?
Some respondents to the survey were concerned that hugely expensive outside consultants would be commissioned to do the re-branding, and that the SDC had been duped by peddlers of media spin. The less-exciting reality is that the SDC has recently recruited an in-house designer, in order to cut down on design costs, and part of that role involves re-assessing the SDC’s visual communications. This means that the re-branding work will be done at no extra cost to the SDC. It also means that no resources will be diverted from the SDC’s core work in order to complete this work. By using someone who is internal to the SDC, we will ensure that the brand is developed through a close and detailed understanding of the organisation’s role and daily work.
The first stage of the work was to survey opinions of the SDC secretariat and network on the SDC’s brand values, to see if they still hold true to the organisation’s aims and purpose.
The key findings from the branding survey
A lot of the survey responses referred more to the structure of the organisation than the brand. This does not invalidate the comments, but it needs to be made clear that there is a difference between the daily realities of the work the SDC does and the purpose and ambition that a brand communicates about that work to the outside world.
This conflation of structure and brand is, in part, a reflection of an unclear brand. A brand should demonstrate where an organisation is now and where it wants to be in the future. In this sense the data shows a brand that does not work consistently well across the areas to which it is applied.
One common theme from your responses comes from the split between our two main audiences – government and SD stakeholders. These separate audiences and identities need to be seen as one brand, and understood as separate strands within that brand. This underlines the importance of the new brand being applied consistently across all elements, to project the image of a joined-up organisation.
Some of your comments were particularly strategic – and because they were so significant, we have decided to deal with them by feeding all of your responses into our forthcoming strategic review.
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