City of Santa Rosa

The upfront time we invest during the DISCOVER phase is critical to a project’s success. Making sure all voices are heard and the landscape is understood is key. Our DISCOVER phase for the City of Santa Rosa involved many stakeholders, many meetings, and a couple of unexpected U-turns. Our work in this phase revealed that the real heavy lifting was going to be finding the right name. We needed a name that resonated with the partners, inspired those who receive services and appealed to the community at large. The name needed to put a positive spin on the important services being offered. We knew the City of Santa Rosa lives in a world of acronyms so we made sure to get ahead of that culture and find a name that either embraced or steered clear of being shortened into an acronym.

We came out of the DISCOVER phase armed with a ton of knowledge which we then applied to the DESIGN phase. We worked with a small breakout group and then presented options to a larger group of stakeholders. Managing large, diverse groups like this can be challenging but with the right process in place the learning you glean is worth the effort. We realized that choosing the right words for the new name was key, and we had robust conversations about which words to keep and which to change. Ultimately, the Santa Rosa Violence Prevention Partnership, or The Partnership for short, was born. Once we had a name we worked on logo designs which carried forward the existing logo colors to maintain that equity. The final logo is circular which represents how inclusive this organization is and includes a silhouette which represents the positive support it provides to the community.

Once we had a name and logo we all loved it was time to DEVELOP a campaign to support them. We worked with leadership from the city to create the campaign: The future is unwritten. Our youth. Our safety. Our community. Our role was to execute and extend this across multiple outreach tools including ads, mailers, banners, bus ads, the website, brochures, and t-shirts.

We love helping clients DRIVE their messaging. For the City of Santa Rosa we continued to provide ongoing support for The Partnership's promotional pieces. The department has now moved under the Office of Community Engagement making it much more heavily associated with the City of Santa Rosa, so we are currently discussing the potential need to update the branding to reflect this change. While DRIVE is our last phase, for many clients it leads to other projects or to a need to cycle back through the original phases. We love when we can use the knowledge we have gained to help DRIVE our clients forward.