WORLD CONCERN BRAND REFRESH

Background

World Concern is a Christian global relief and development agency whose supporters’ faith calls them to extend opportunity and hope to people facing the most profound human challenges of extreme poverty. Unlike other relief and development organizations that have a binary relationship to their beneficiaries, World Concern takes a whole systems approach to breaking the cycle of poverty, addressing each beneficiary’s physical, social, emotional and spiritual health.

World Concern asks the people they help to serve with them, building the programs the beneficiaries need most. At the same time, they build within each beneficiary a sense of accomplishment, greater understanding and confidence in their own lives.

Challenge

World Concern’s primary positioning challenges included:

• Differentiating from other, well knows Christian relief organization, similarly named and headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.
• Building value/understanding in the investment-grade programs that lead to lasting – not just temporal – change in lives and communities.
• Communicating the tangibility of their programs, in a donor community that is increasingly impatient for results.
• Establishing an identity that transcended individual programs or disasters/events.
• Stoking a sense of moral imperative – inviting people to re-think the idea of “neighbors,” and the consequences of injustice in an interdependent world.

Outcome

Unlike monolithic relief and development efforts, World Concern has a dominant “adaptiveness” gene, enabling them to plan, scale and develop programs tailored to each particular community’s circumstance, in the most remote corners of the planet, where climate and geography, societal instability and scarce infrastructure create incredible challenges to others. Quite simply, World Concern equips people to overcome the injustice of poverty.

To convey that, we developed the brand position: Lasting Good Through Lasting Hope. And in support of the brand position, we developed the brand tagline: Witness the Transformation. We then partnered with Turnstyle to develop the brand identity for the organization, which has been met with resounding success.