Summary

This project began as an effort to standardize visual aspects of the residential programming board’s brand, and snowballed into an intense value-finding process that helped center and define our organization in its formative third year of existence. The implementation of results from this project have led to a 100.8 percent growth in Residential Programming Board followership since September 2018.

Creation of the brand guide relied on cycles of workshop development, running the workshop, and refining the content generated in the workshop into the final version of the brand guide.Throughout this process, the ability to draw a clear connection between the work our team does on the day to day, and the deep seated motivations behind it has allowed our team to more meaningfully connect with a sense of purpose. The following project explores this process in detail, as well as specific insights I gained in the process.

The success of this process has induced its repackaging as a series of workshops, originally held at the 2019 University of Washington Housing and Food Services Residential Life Training Summit. This workshop, titled “Developing Your Personal and Organizational Brand”, drew from this process to teach attendees how values can and should be reflected in everyday outreach and branding strategies. Since this summit, this workshop has been iteratively developed and run with teams of 8 - 20 people. More information on my workshop development and general experiences with public speaking can be found in the public speaking project.

Organization Background

From September 2018 to present, I’ve been working with the Residential Programming Board (RPB) under University of Washington Housing and Food Services. Our team plans and executes large scale, community building events for students who live on campus.

Our Mission

The Residential Programming Board (RPB) engages residents in an inclusive community through large-scale, diverse, social programming. RPB provides unique, financially accessible opportunities often through collaboration with organizations both on and off campus.

My Role

Within RPB, I am the Director of Public Relations. In this role, I focus on insight-driven content development, manage social media outreach, and long-term publicity related projects. My most notable project so far, which spans the creation of our brand guide, is the organizational rebrand of the Residential Programming Board’s Social Media and PR strategies.

The Project

The RPB Brand Guide is a compilation of the standards our team developed through a series of exercises and workshops intended to center our brand around core values. When I set out to create a brand guide for RPB in its formative third year of existence, I decided that this was more than an opportunity to create a flexible document to guide future Public Relations Directors. An organization’s brand and PR strategy should be rooted in the core values and culture of the organization, aspects of RPB that had yet to be thoroughly fleshed out.

So, rather than design a document with a bunch of meaningless standards that didn’t have significance to anyone except me, I turned to my team. The 2018/19 RPB staff were endlessly patient with my repeated requests for them to dig into what the organization really meant, especially as all of these exercises were conducted during our 7 am staff meetings.

The Process

My plan for the development of our brand guide began focused on a series of workshops intended to collaboratively develop various aspects of our brand. Tying our brand to values first required development of our mission statement and core values. From values, we moved into more external aspects of our brand, such as Brand Image and Brand Voice. Finally, our team discussed how the guidelines we’d developed should play into our larger Public Relations and Social Media Strategies.

Development of Mission Statement:

Many brand guides I reviewed in preparation for this project began with a Mission Statement, something I quickly found out that our organization didn’t have. We were entering only our third year of existence when I joined the team in 2018, and until that point RPB had focused mainly on developing protocols and training structures. I felt that with this solid foundation, it was an appropriate time to craft a concise statement about our motivations and intentions.

To do so, I dug into the reasons that University of Washington Housing and Food Services funded our board in the first place. They wanted us to help ‘create community’ and ‘forge relationships’ between students through creating safe, unique circumstances to have fun. After noting these higher level goals, I looked at specific interactions between our staff members and our residents to tease out how these intentions filter into our day to day work.

In finding common threads between lofty organizational goals and the way we communicated in the real world, I began to craft versions of our mission statement. I brought these to our team, and after iterative wording tweaks we came to a unanimous consensus on our new Mission Statement:

Beyond our mission statement, I felt the need to develop some value keywords to better root our brand voice and brand image guidelines. To do so, I developed and ran the following workshop with my team.

Workshop 1: Developing Organizational Values

With our mission statement in place, I asked our team to reflect on the goals for what our organization does, as well as what motivates each employee’s performance. In one of our staff meetings, I passed out a simple sheet with a list of value words, and asked each team member to circle the 5 words that they felt best reflected our organization’s values. In the next week, I collected these sheets and created a word cloud to show the distribution of popular responses.

The Mission Statement and Values Workshop gave me the content I needed to create and refine the first section of the Brand Guide:

From here, I moved into workshops to refine The Residential Programming Board’s Brand Image and Brand Voice.

Workshop 2: Developing Brand Image

To create a more uniform brand feeling, I felt that our team really needed specify down the feelings we want images we post to evoke, as well as what types of images create those feelings. To do so, I assigned them to look through the University of Washington Stock Photo Vault, as well as RPB’s Facebook Page. From these sites, I asked each team member to email me 5 photos that elicited feelings they’d want associated with RPB, and five that didn’t, with an explanation of why for each.

For the next meeting, I synthesized the most common photos as well as trends in explanations to present back to our team. Throughout my presentation, we stopped to discuss what aspects of the positive photos made us relate to them, and what we could translate into future imagery goals for our brand. We also scrutinized past photos we’ve posted on our Facebook account, noting what about them detracted from our overall brand image. In particular, looking at our own posting history made the exercise personal and better ingrained the difference these discussions could make in changing external perceptions of The Residential Programming Board.

This workshop had two overarching effects. Firstly, it developed my sense of the type of photos that resonated with our developing brand, allowing for clearer articulation of brand image guidelines. Possibly more importantly though, this exercise oriented my team towards recognizing and articulating what type of imagery evokes feelings we want associated with RPB. Now, this skill is particularly valuable as I can seek second opinions from anyone on the team about a potential post with certainty that our understanding of the brand imagery ideals are aligned.

Workshop 3: Developing Brand Voice

Rather than another take home project, the basic development of our brand voice occurred over the course of one staff meeting, with refinement through discussion and training at future meetings. To help our team develop a brand voice, I first had to explore and explore what brand voice was. My presentation for this workshop began by giving examples of companies with distinctive brand voices. In doing research for this workshop, I developed the following strategy for curating the RPB Brand voice. This process is represented in graphic form on the left and written out on the right:

The final result of this workshop was the following table, which describes RPB’s key ‘Voice Characteristics’ describes them, and gives concrete examples of what does and does not reflect that quality of our brand voice. The following pages are from the Brand Voice section from the Brand Guide.

Developing the Residential Programming Board as a team was another opportunity to ground our social media presence and PR strategies in values, as well as ensure everyone on our team was on the same page. Although I, as current Director of Public Relations, still do most of the captioning and content strategy for our outreach, this consolidation of ideas ensures that I’m able to run my potential content by other team members and receive feedback grounded in a shared understanding of our goals.

Developing our Social Media and PR Strategy

Up until this point, the Residential Programming Board outreach strategies had been simply being an active poster on Facebook and Instagram. In developing these standards and guidelines, our team was able to more clearly lay out posting strategies and standards for future members of our team. The major changes enacted fell into two main categories: posting more intentionally curated content to establish a clear relationship with our audience, and engaging our audience both on and off -line.

Our workshops with Brand Voice and Brand Image fueled decisions about the type of content we should be posting on various social media sites, and the last section of the Brand Guide relates those insights to our specific outreach policies:

In order to engage our audience both on and off -line, we began to run more giveaways, post interactive rather than static media, and incorporate custom hashtags, QR codes, and filters into our events.

Takeaways

As a result of these strategies and implementation of standardized guidelines, Residential Programming Followership has grown 100.8% since September 2018. As an example of interactive strategies, the average engagement is 104 interactions per instagram voting poll, in comparison to zero as our previous social media strategies didn’t utilize interactive methods such as polling or online question prompts.

More than just statistical growth however, these activities grounded our organization in a distinct set of purpose and clearly defined values. The ability to draw a clear connection between the work we do on the day to day, and the deep seated motivations behind it has allowed our team to more meaningfully connect with a sense of purpose.

On a personal level, the design and execution of these workshops, as well as the creation of the final brand guide, fostered long term content curation skills and strategic thinking. Beyond being an excellent document design and content strategy practice, creation of this brand guide pushed me to think about how I could reach people, and ask them to tap into a higher sense of purpose. Learning how to open these conversations and steer them toward an actionable consensus inspired me to scrutinize my own values, and they way they influence everything I do and create.

The success of this process has induced its repackaging as a workshop, recently presented at the 2019 University of Washington Housing and Food Services Residential Life Training Summit. This workshop, titled “Developing Your Personal and Organizational Brand”, drew from this process and taught attendees how values can and should be reflected in everyday outreach and branding strategies. The slide deck for this workshop is available here.