Guild Care
Based in our home town of Worthing, West Sussex, Guild Care provides care services for older people, including those with dementia, and younger people with special needs or learning difficulties. In its 80th anniversary year, the charity commissioned us to refresh its brand identity.
At Warren Creative, we see every branding project as a journey, and every brand as a story. We began by visiting Guild Care’s properties, and meeting everyone from service users and care staff to the CEO. By gathering information and opinions, we came to understand how the organisation worked, and what needed fixing. It was a long list: the logo was outdated, the website cumbersome, and all literature and signage drab and unfriendly. Most importantly, not even those within the charity itself really knew just how much good work it did.
We needed to join up the dots, and give everyone within the organisation ownership and a sense of belonging – all within the inevitable budgetary constraints faced by charities. After presenting our thoughts to a small core team, we ran a series of workshops, getting each department involved in the brand identity process. Our final logo retained the Guild Care name and heart device, but we introduced icons varied and colours to reflect individual areas, based on suggestions by the departments themselves. This helped to create a sense that teams were individually strong, but collectively even stronger.
With unanimous support from the trustees, we refined Guild Care’s ‘Vision, Mission and Values Statement’, developed and clarified the brand architecture, and produced brand guidelines for the in-house design and marketing team to follow. We also completely redesigned the website, with a clean, simple design making it easy to use, and the key messages much clearer. Guild Care is a fantastic local charity, full of lovely caring people, and it was a pleasure to be involved with them. Having taken the time to really understand the organisation and get to the root of what needed fixing, we achieved a strong, united brand identity that everyone loves, and has proved a great success.