Brand: Kinvolved
Team: Brandathon
“On a mission to minimize chronic absenteeism. Less than 20% of chronically absent students will earn their diploma.”
Context
Build a brand from scratch in three days with a team of creatives and clients you’ve just met? That’s the idea behind Brandathon, a hackathon for startups, creatives and strategists and that’s just what we did. We were linked up with the founders of Kinvolved, a social enterprise on a mission to boost student attendance and tackle chronic absenteeism by engaging educators, families, and communities through a combination of technology tools and in-person interventions.
Insight
While the app was extremely effective in driving results and school outcomes, the team wanted to better represent their vision to include parents and administrators in education by way of their brand.
We uncovered that school administrators were overwhelmed and looking for ways to connect with parents - and that parents often didn’t feel staff and teachers understood or appreciated them. Everyone was playing for the same team - and Kinvolved was bringing them together.
Our insight: Kinvolved was building invaluable connections through its core product offering between these two important audiences.
Creative + Strategy Partners: Mauricio Garcia, Jon Chang
Results
Project won 1st place at Brandathon
Client team adopted recommendations and continues to use core brand elements
Continued strong brand, financial and product performance and an emphasis on financial impact and community through communications (for more on Kinvolved check out some recent stats here.)
Solution
We built a new visual identity and logo mark around the brand idea of “Uniting the Village” to celebrate the connections Kinvolved was building. It served as the north star, and drove the brand’s new purpose of finding smarter ways to bring together the community behind every kid. Within the logo itself, we chose to highlight the the idea of achievement and results through the signature check mark, while making the rest of the mark friendly and caring, with rounded elements and by humanizing the “i” to evoke a sense of play and childlike imagery. To top it off, we recommended a lean growth program to scale the brand towards their net round of funding over 6 months.
Not only did we win the Brandathon competition, but today the Kinvolved app has grown substantially, and continues to significantly drive achievement and value for school districts involved in Kinvolved programs.
Jon Chang, Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), myself, and Mauricio Garcia
