Building a brand to engage a community and inspire a city.

OSI Big Change Event Branding

For the past 15 years, the Open Society of Baltimore has been working to bring positive, lasting change to Baltimore City. They strive to uncover the root cause of the fundamental social maladies that have prevented Baltimore’s full potential- as city of abundant opportunity, justice, and prosperity.

Challenge

We were asked to develop a comprehensive brand for their 15-year anniversary conference – Big Change Baltimore. It would be a one-day forum that would bring together the most respected minds and thought-leaders in the areas of social justice, urban planning, and human behavior. The intent would be to inform, inspire, and promote meaningful discourse on achieving enduring social change within our cities.

With those lofty, aspirational goals, however, came very specific metrics for success: sell at least 400 tickets to the 500 seat venue, and ensure that 100 of those seats were filled by Baltimore's top business leaders.

Insights

Our discovery process revealed that the benefit of OSI's work was subtle and nuanced and could be easily misunderstood by those not within the field and more importantly, by the business leaders they were targeting.

Results

To overcome this problem, we developed a brand platform that integrated high-level messaging with a visual identity system designed to reinforce the benefits of OSI's work while also explaining the complex underlying concepts of social justice in simple and evocative way.

We used the platform to create executional pieces including: a brand-essence video, responsive website, collateral material, and venue signage.

Selling out weeks before the event with over 150 business leaders in attendance, Big Change Baltimore was a critical success for OSI.