14 April 2024

New brand, same passion for building stronger somerset communities

By Laura Blake, Philanthropy Director

After many months of hard work behind the scenes, I’m absolutely thrilled to be launching our new brand and website.

From the outside, you’ll most likely notice our fresh new logo and the rich tapestry of greens in our colour palette. These speak to the essence of who we are – a charity for the beautiful county of Somerset. 

It’s also a lot easier to find what you’re looking for here compared to our very outdated, clunky and cluttered old website.

But a brand is so much more than how we look.

A brand is what people say about us when we’re not in the room. It’s what makes us unique, even as one of hundreds of Community Foundations around the world.  Most importantly, it’s how we make people feel. 

Done right, a rebrand should help an organisation better understand themselves and be better at what they do.

That’s why I want to talk a bit about why we chose to undertake this work, how we approached it, and how we’ll use it to make a bigger impact in the years to come.

Why we chose to update our brand

Community Foundations are, frustratingly, one of the UK’s best kept secrets – despite providing a combined £170 million of funding for small, local charities last year alone. 

For years, our Fundholders have told us how much they value our expertise, while also expressing their surprise at how many people have never heard of Somerset Community Foundation (SCF) – something we’ve been working hard to try and change. 

What was wrong with the current brand and website?

We knew from feedback that our website was hard to navigate with too much information. Potential supporters would often call or email us, confused about the right way to give, and would need us to start from scratch explaining everything we do. For groups, the funding programme pages were extremely long and dense making applying for funding harder and more daunting. 

Alongside this, we struggled to clearly and simply articulate what we do, our strengths, and why people should give through SCF.

Our brand wasn’t memorable or easily identifiable.

And we struggled to reach groups we hadn’t funded before and to get more of our funding to historically underfunded communities.*

Our 2021-25 strategy set out plans to significantly grow our income to provide more vital funding for our communities. We’ve achieved good income growth in the last 5 years and increased the awareness of our work.

But looking at the scale of need in our communities now – and anticipating the challenges of the future – we knew we needed to update our brand and website. Without it, we lacked a vital tool to help us reach the scale of our ambition. 

How we engaged the people we serve

It was crucial to us that the brand and website were shaped by the people we’re here to serve.

From the very start, we engaged a wonderful and diverse group of charity sector colleagues, supporters, professional advisers and partners. This was one of the best decisions we made.

Their feedback, expertly collected, analysed and distilled by The Co-Foundry, our fantastic brand agency, helped us realise, among other things:

The groups we funded wanted us to be bolder in highlighting the need in our communities and amplifying their voices to bring more attention to key social issues. That’s why our new website talks specifically about the need in Somerset and why stories – usually told by the groups themselves – are spotlighted throughout the site.

We needed to be more confident in highlighting the impact we make as a charity. Feedback told us to make more of the expertise we have as a team, the quality of the service we offer both donors and those who apply for funding, and the friendly, values-driven service we provide. 

That’s why you’ll see us talking much more about our impact, about our unparalleled local knowledge, and why every funding programme has a named member of our team to talk to for help and support with applications.  

We needed to be clearer and simpler in our language and the way we describe giving through SCF. Terms like ‘Endowment Fund’, ‘Flow Through Fund’ and ‘Named Fund’ are just some of the terms we’ve updated – now ‘Forever Fund’, ‘Immediate Impact Fund’ and ‘Charitable Fund’ respectively. We’ve also updated the way we write to be warmer, use more plain English and be more concise.

We needed to be more accessible for all: building a simpler, clearer and more accessible site for everyone we serve was at the very heart of the project. The colours and fonts we used and the design of the website – masterminded by Cognique – plus the new accessibility plugin in the bottom right corner of the site, all help to ensure it’s as inclusive as possible.

How we’ll use this work to grow our impact

Creating a new brand is all well and good, but it’s we do next that counts. So what are we planning?

Driving increased awareness of SCF to inspire more giving and philanthropy

We’ve increased our marketing capacity and budget to reach more potential supporters, professional advisers and the wider Somerset community. Look out for a stronger presence on LinkedIn, more use of video to tell powerful and inspiring stories, and marketing campaigns that help tell more people what we do and inspire them to be part of it.

Building more flexible and long-term funding for our communities

We know that the groups we fund need stability. They need core-funding that supports the running costs of their organisations, not just projects they run.

That’s why we’re proud to launch our Collective Giving Funds: research-driven Funds that bring donors together to make a bigger impact, both now and for generations to come. These Funds will be a vital source of flexible funding which will enable us to respond to community need and give groups more space to plan ahead and make more impact.

Working harder to reach more historically underfunded communities

Alongside the improvements we’ve made to our website and how we support potential applicants, we’ll be working on new ways to reach these communities. 

And finally, a few thank yous

If you’ve got this far, then thank you for taking an interest in our work! However you’re involved with SCF, whether a supporter, voluntary sector group, partner or volunteer, we’re hugely grateful to you for your support. 

I must also say a huge thank you to the wonderful volunteers and the SCF team who gave their time to shape the process, our brilliant Senior Marketing Manager, Sue Wheeler, who worked diligently and extremely hard on the project, and our wonderful agencies The Co-Foundry and Cognique, who have delivered a truly exceptional result for our organisation.

We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress.

* For us, historically underfunded communities are communities who are marginalised or otherwise disadvantaged due to background, geography or other socio-economic factors that we have historically underfunded. This includes, but isn’t limited to, organisations led by and for minority ethnic communities, people with disabilities and people who identify as LGBTQ+, as well as people living in the most deprived neighbourhoods and isolated rural communities.