Brand Alignment
Prison Fellowship:
Restructured. Reorganized. Revitalized.
Customer Overview
Prison Fellowship partners with local churches across the country to minister to a group that society often scorns and neglects: prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families. The Prison Fellowship ministry has grown and evolved over its thirty-year history. As the organization encompassed new ministries, its brand had become diffused and its message less focused. Prison Fellowship sought JDG's help in finding a way to preserve the strength of its existing brands while providing a structure that communicates the relationship between its many programs and components of the entire organization. Prison Fellowship and JDG Communications worked together to develop a revised brand strategy and hierarchy to better align the programs of Prison Fellowship and overcome confusion.
Project Overview
In order to address Prison Fellowship's concerns, JDG assisted in the following:
Communications Audit and Discovery—JDG reviewed the sample publications provided by the client to better understand the range of products that were being created by the many program areas.This helped prepare our team to facilitate the brand development process.
Internal Workshop—JDG prepared and led a message workshop with Prison Fellowship executives to help create the framework for the new corporate marketing materials. The workshop's participants identified stakeholders, target audiences, business lines, value proposition, and points of differentiation.
Corporate Message and Tagline Development—JDG refined the themes and messages following the workshop. These messages became the foundation for all content development to be incorporated in the corporate collateral and graphic standards.
Define Brand Hierarchy—JDG proposed an overall corporate brand hierarchy that organizes the parent and sub-brands into categories that support the corporate messaging and mission based on the information collected from the facilitated session and from our communications audit.
Visual Representation Guidelines—JDG then developed a top-level guidelines document that illustrated the relationship of the corporate brand to the sub-brands and explained how to leverage existing brand equity while concurrently introducing new brands.
Audiences
One of JDG's tasks was to determine and define the audiences of Prison Fellowship. Our message workshop identified three primary target groups:
- Prisoners and their families
- Church leaders
- Donors and volunteers
Challenges
Given the importance and scope of the messaging, Prison Fellowship and JDG faced many challenges during the re-branding process. For starters, the two primary programs—prisoner/family ministry and worldview ministry (Wilberforce)— conveyed such unique messages to completely different audiences that it was problematic identifying an appropriate common brand and overarching theme.
Solution
Once JDG conducted the communications audit and message workshop, the following recommendations were developed on the basis of the research:
A Brand Essence—"Living your faith, every day." This represents the organization's beliefs and is the framework for communications.
A New Corporate Name— Because Prison Fellowship was already established as the longstanding corporate name, JDG called on the research findings to introduce PFM as the organization's new "umbrella" identity without adding further confusion. This was an especially delicate situation because JDG simultaneously suggested that Prison Fellowship should be repositioned in the brand hierarchy. Since staff and corporate donors often used the initials "PFM" in their communications, this was elevated to the new corporate level brand.
A New Brand Hierarchy— The new corporate name of PFM should be supported by two service brands: Prison Fellowship and BreakPoint. JDG's research determined that the existing equity in the names Prison Fellowship and BreakPoint was too valuable to ignore. By retaining the names and assign them the role of service brands, their established value was leveraged.
New Logo Designs— JDG created the corporate PFM logo and the service brand BreakPoint logo. In designing the PFM logo, the initials were placed in the same shape as the existing Prison Fellowship logo but positioned in a horizontal format to accommodate the letters. The same typeface was selected for all three logos to build consistency across the family of identities.
A New Tagline—"Changing Lives, Minds, and Communities through Jesus Christ."
High-level Messaging—JDG provided high-level messages that could be used for each level of branding.
Marketing Implications— JDG made suggestions of how to best implement the new brand hierarchy and alignment.
Results
The PFM corporate brand has been accepted with a great degree of enthusiasm. Because this transition will require ample time to fully take shape, JDG's full graphic standards manual—which explains the use of the new brand hierarchy, taglines and logos created— will be a useful and informative tool for all PFM employees during the transition.
In addition, JDG is in the process of developing corporate materials such as overview brochures, banner-ups and stationery to correspond with the new brand alignment. As the transformation moves forward, PFM will be a more efficient and easy to understand organization thanks in part to its collaboration with JDG.
