Catalyzing philanthropy with Europe’s largest co-living space

Their Challenge

The Foundation approached DrawHistory as its parent company, The Collective, was undertaking a rebrand process with agency, DesignStudio. They challenged us to create a brand strategy and visual identity that would build on what DesignStudio produced with the intent to rally young change-makers to their programs.

Our Strategy

As a philanthropic initiative representing one of the world’s largest co-living spaces, we knew The Collective Foundation had an ambitious mandate on its hands — and needed its own identity to communicate to social entrepreneurs and impact investors. Our opportunity was to identify how the Foundation could leverage the momentum of its parent brand as a large corporate, then create a brand strategy specifically focused on community work, and ultimately better integrate the initiative with a whole-of-organization approach.

A brand for young change-makers

Recognising how important the Foundation’s community would be to its rebrand, we facilitated workshops after project kickoff to co-design the brand with their internal team and program participants. This included completing additional consultations with wider groups who were addressing a gamut of issues: accelerator participants, co-living residents, impact investors and team members.

Many of the socioeconomic and environmental issues stakeholders were actively addressing became a core element of the final identity:

• Economic opportunity
• Social integration
• Health and wellbeing
• Environmental sustainability

Rallying people to an impact program

Once we arrived at our final concept, we developed the Foundation’s entire design system based on causes that covered the socioeconomic and environmental issues their people were actively addressing.

This included textures by what has inspired them in their mission — plants and oceans for the environment, concrete surfaces for urban structures and fur for animal welfare.

Designing the user journey

The identity permeated to digital, where we helped the Foundation activate a resources and sign up portal to accompany the launch of its London Accelerator program, running a gamut of user experience workshops and producing low-fidelity prototypes before launching the live WordPress build online.

Community Outcome

The Collective Foundation has supported 40 social enterprises, impacted over 700,000 lives through their programs and launched in three cities: London, New York and Berlin.