For the past six months I've been redesigning, rebranding and revamping internal and external communication and marketing materials for one of the most unique program areas of CCF: The Sponsorship Department.

The confirmation email that leads sponsors to a Resource Center, a website platform designed specifically for new sponsors to find resources and answers to questions they have.

I say unique for many reasons, but the main one I'm referring to when I tell people about CCF's Sponsorship program is that it is a one-on-one relationship with an actual child who goes to school at CCF. If a sponsor stops communicating after a certain amount of time, we basically find new sponsors for that child. Sponsors can meet their sponsor kids, in real life (no scams here), in Phnom Penh, see where they go to school, take them out for pizza, etc. The kids build lifelong relationships and friendships with their sponsors and their sponsors families'. I've seen kids during a Skype date with their sponsor families and it's moving. It is one of the best programs we run, in my opinion.

The best part about this project and my daily work at CCF is that I get the chance to use all my skills on almost every project. For this particular project, I used a few of the following skills: design, photography, video, web design, managerial, strategic development and marketing. Here's a breakdown of some of the work I produced on this project and a few of my thoughts.

1. INTERNAL STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS PLAN
I wasn't given a task to redesign our sponsorship department. As with most NGO's and the inner-workings of departments within them, there are almost always improvements just waiting for some overzealous employee to take on. I knew I wanted to brand and give an identity to some of the departments of CCF. In order to rebrand, I realized how much I'd have to dig into the pre-existing internal communications in order to produce marketing materials that made sense for Sponsorship.

I worked closely with the Head of Sponsorship to pinpoint areas of communication which needed improvement, both internally and externally. I set up surveys for existing and new sponsors in order to understand weak and strong points of past communication avenues and how we could improve them for future growth. We used these weak areas to restructure the internal communications workflow and created a new strategic communication plan. This took many interviews and meetings with key individuals including in-the-field staff and managers.

COMMS PLAN VISUALIZED Below is an example of the way I used design as a tool for our staff to help everyone visualize the new Sponsorship Communication Plan. This design was used to explain to employees their new roles and timeframes for each task so that there was less confusion when we rolled out the new process. I've deleted and abbreviated most of the information in the graphic below.

2. BRANDING FOR THE FUTURE
One of my biggest concerns in giving an identity to the Sponsorship department was making sure it was developed in a way that would allow other departments the option of branding so that they would all seamlessly fit together under the existing CCF identity.

Obviously an in-depth rebranding should be done at CCF with multiple branding elements and goals in mind. We will be redesigning our website and branding later.

There really isn't anything deep about how I did this. I picked a color that works in our current branding guidelines, played with a bunch of hand drawn fonts, drew my own, incorporated parts of the current CCF logo and put it together. The key here was making sure other departments (such as the Volunteer department - coming soon!) could also follow suit with the hand drawn feel.

This is one of the iterations of the logo we ended up with. The graphic below is the one I used as the opener to the video, welcoming a new sponsor. I used it in several other spots throughout the identity rebranding.

3. SAVE THE PLANET One of the most important complaints/suggestions we got from our survey was to stop wasting money and paper on physical leaflets and packages. Our old system was set up to send a physical folder in the mail, from Cambodia, with a photo of the newly sponsored child, a DVD of our CEO thanking the new sponsor, information about CCF, policies and other important info. Sometimes this packet would arrive 3 months after it was sent and sometimes not at all. One of my biggest tasks was breaking this packet down into a "Digital Sponsorship Package" which we eventually called the Sponsor Resource Center.

The Sponsorship Resource Center is a place where new sponsors can come to access any and all information regarding sponsorship at CCF. I took the photos, did the design and produced the video. I love this part of my job. Below is a final version of the design:

4. PRINT MATERIALS
One of the things we didn't want to lose with the new rollout, was the feel of being in Cambodia while communicating with sponsors around the world. Who doesn't like to get a package from a far away land? So I redesigned a few materials that will stay as part of the physical contact we'll make with sponsors and potential sponsors.