Of course, fundraising, campaigning, and recruitment provide the essential bedrock to support such complex operations and a communications system to maximize awareness of the charity’s work’s reach and impact. Action Against Hunger has headquarters in France, Spain, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, and Canada and operational project bases worldwide. So, effective communications are essential to keeping everyone in the loop worldwide.
Photography and video are crucial in bringing to life the charity’s diverse projects in many different countries. However, creating these visual assets is expensive. Maximum value must be gained from every photograph, video, and marketing artwork to be used strategically and effectively by the corporate, fundraising, and campaign teams in each office.
Action Against Hunger’s Brandworkz brand portal – they’ve named it the Brand Forum – has been effective in helping to achieve this vital, fast, and accurate distribution of high-value content. Lucy Shaverin, the charity’s Creative Content Manager in the UK, says, ‘Previously, no one really knew what other teams were doing because it was hard to share. In fact, we were creating more work by not sharing. That is all beginning to change now’.
The organization recently underwent a rebranding program, so the Brand Forum also has a brand management role. It brings together in one place the corporate guidelines, tone of voice, positioning, core messaging, visual icons, fonts, logos, and so on, alongside the photography, videos, and other marketing materials.
‘It’s really useful having all our vision and brand narrative documents on the Brand Forum too,’ Lucy says. ‘Having just rebranded, we need to keep a tight lid on things and ensure people do things properly. It has proved very useful. Things like the Logo Finder are good for those who are not very digital savvy because they can find logos in the right format and different languages.’
The Brand Forum now combines much information about the charity, its principles, and its story into highly visual web pages quickly clicked through and understood. It also centralizes approved design guidelines, best practice instruction on the use of photography, branding elements, videos, brand assets of every kind, templates, and multi-language logos.
‘We are now getting user-generated content coming in,’ says Lucy. ‘Staff on the ground and the communities we work with are documenting what they’re doing with video cameras. The quality will never be as good, but you get authentic content that directly links audiences to the field. People respond well to that.’
All this results in a reduced workload on the comms teams at each regional office – and much more sharing. Says Lucy: ‘We are seeing significant time-saving, improved access for everyone and better sharing of assets between the HQs. As a global organization, we have great content and amazing stories from our projects and programs, and we want everyone to be able to share and use them.’
Most importantly, it is ease-of-use that sets the Brandworkz platform apart, says Lucy. ‘It’s a simple, user-friendly platform that fits our business needs perfectly. And everyone at Brandworkz has been helpful in looking at how we can improve things. In fact, they’ve been great to work with.’
