What change do you want to see in the world? The Birmingham In Action brand brings together a wide range of life-changing charitable projects at the University of Birmingham under one fundraising and volunteering campaign. Birmingham In Action addresses five key challenges: access to education, better treatments for cancer, protecting our planet, young people’s mental health, and families fleeing war and violence. The branding needed to bring together these five challenges, 15 projects and three calls to action in a way that felt relevant to five different audiences, and was exciting and different but didn’t undermine the core university brand. Based directly on evidence from focus groups about what our audiences really want, the brand adapts the strength of the core university brand for charitable purposes.
From the Judges
This is great branding, conceptually and visually well conceived and really brought to life and activated. There is much here to emulate. The basic device is so simple that at first it appears merely clever: Highlight the "IN" from “BirmINgham to get “Birmingham in Action,” among other phrases. Happily the “Birmingham in ___” lockups actually read properly, thanks to fundamentally solid design. The fill-in-the-blank device also turns out to be extensible to various causes, geographic locations, and even calls to action. That kind of simplicity and flexibility drive consistency. The device is eminently usable. More important, as the entry explains, the device is allied with a carefully chosen question, "What do you care about?”
