Teammates
Expanding a nonprofit’s roster through rebranding
The TeamMates mentoring program began in 1991 thanks to the vision of University of Nebraska Head Football Coach, Tom Osborne and his wife, Nancy. The program would start a movement to encourage adults to volunteer their time to students who could use another adult to lean on.
Today the program has more than 135 chapters within school districts, and serves more than 7,500 youth.
Amazing work.
But there was one problem.
Research identified a challenge with recruiting adult mentors to volunteer their time due to a fear of being unsuccessful. TeamMates felt this would be a good opportunity to update its brand and create a stronger message geared toward recruitment. Our challenge included building on equity from the existing logo while updating and developing a more cohesive brand aesthetic across materials.
Previous brandmark
After extensive research to learn more about the growth and evolution of the TeamMates program, we explored varying visual stories to help draw interest to the brand without losing any of the existing brand equity.
We were careful to keep several components including: tagline, “Together We Transform Lives”, athletic appeal to honor the organization’s roots, TeamMates.org, and consideration to how individual chapter names can be included in the logo. The solution we created also needed to include recommendations for recognizing TeamMates’ 25th anniversary.
The rebrand for TeamMates helped evolve the organization to speak more clearly to today’s audience.
At the center of the rebrand was the updated logo, which still paid homage to its roots in athletics yet moved the brand forward with a more modern look and feel.
Through clearly defined brand guidelines, the internal TeamMates team could execute marketing materials using the new brand, including a new brand voice, advertising templates, social media tools such as avatars and messaging templates, Microsoft templates for Word and PowerPoint executions, video animation, and more.
In addition, templates were created for multiple collateral pieces and stationery. Rounding out TeamMates rebrand, we provided recommendations for successfully reskinning the organization’s existing website and future-minded projects to help continue the newfound energy and momentum behind the organization.
