Overview
A non-profit local to LA has been hard at work, ensuring underrepresented communities have the opportunity to break into the entertainment industry. After the first year’s success, they’re now aiming to expand their reach, their brand, and their website.
The background
Evolve Entertainment Fund (EEF) was created in 2018 to help marginalized and underrepresented artists break into the entertainment industry. In the first year alone, they worked with over 200 students, partnered with 60 entertainment companies, and secured over 150 paid positions.
EEF hoped to expand their enrollment to 1,000 students in the second year, but this would require a sharp increase in outreach and efficiency. This means that a fully developed brand and a clear strategy would be necessary in order for them to hit their goal. We wanted this new website to illustrate the success, mission, and the resources of EEF; just as importantly, it needed to reduce the administrative load of the organization and prepare for expansion.
We split our game plan into two phases: branding first, website second.
The branding
In Phase One, we created the brand identity. It’s necessary for the brand to outline the values of EEF and how they helped facilitate the organization’s success. To begin, we meet for one of my favorites: a strategic planning workshop.
We talk about what’s at the heart of EEF – who is the audience, what are the attributes of the organization, what is the ideal brand representation, and so much more. It’s important at these workshops that we also discuss short- and long-term goals. At this meeting, EEF outlined plans to eventually split from the Mayor’s Fund and become their own entity (click here to read about how we developed that project).
The visual identity
From there, we move on to stylescapes and brand guidelines for a visual and vocal brand identity that fits with the information gathered in the workshop. This typically takes several revisions, but our strategic planning workshop gave me such a clear vision of their identity that the new branding came together quickly.
The website
With our work up to this point being so foundational and intensive, the design and development steps were straightforward. It was important that we were building out a website that could grow with the organization, both from a branding and organizational perspective.
Ultimately, we needed this website to serve three purposes: be the face of the organization, provide relevant information to partners and students; and outline the resources available to support current students; and provide logistical support for the team. EEF wanted the front-and-center information to be success stories and student resources.
Because this project contained full strategy and branding, the work that we did would also be carried over to other projects and marketing materials. I made sure that everything they received was optimized for social and that they had additional social media material.
The hiccup
We had landed at a point where the website was ready to launch when another stakeholder was added to the team and threw a wrench in the works. With the addition of more eyes, we were given many last-minute edits that called for a redesign. Since we had done so much foundational work prior to this point, the requested changes were primarily cosmetic.
After a few weeks, we came to a design that satisfied all parties without sacrificing the strategy that EEF was relying on. However these last-minute design changes caused us to sacrifice much of the functionality we intended on adding.
The result
Before we published the new site, we checked in with each other to ensure that the final result mirrored everything we discussed in the redesign workshop. (Spoiler alert: it did!).
We created an identity and a website that communicated the mission and the value of Evolve Entertainment Fund with clarity. The design was user-friendly and simple – clean enough that the success of the organization could take center stage. We started with an in-depth discussion and clear brand guidelines and ended up with a powerful, clean, and direct website that told EEF’s story perfectly.
