Cru is a global outreach organization that focuses primarily on college students in the area of spiritual development. Each summer, they train and equip college students to travel abroad for various outreach opportunities. In 2016, the organization moved from calling these opportunities “Summer Projects,” a name that had been used for several decades, to “Summer Missions.” I was asked to be a part of a team to develop new branding for the name change.
I was brought on as a consultant but as my design resonated with the stakeholders I took on the role of Creative Director for the brand change.
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop
Two months
My team and I talked with the stakeholders from the summer missions rebrand. We learned a lot about the reasons why there was a name change and what their desired outcomes were. They had collected data from previous students and had looked at trends in summer participation The biggest takeaways for me were:
I decided to create three different proto personas. My goal was that each of these profiles would help guide my design so that the final design would achieve the goals of the projects. One user was a traditional Summer Mission participant, who had high awareness of the Cru brand and was familiar with the summer project program. The second was a student who did not have strong awareness of the Cru brand but was interested in summer missions opportunities and the third was a parent of a prospective summer mission participant who was somewhat familiar with Cru.
Luis is a freshman at a large public university. He is hispanic and grew up just outside an urban area. Luis grew up in a nominally Christian home but did not regularly engage in religious activity. There is a large Cru chapter on his campus and during his first week on campus he started attending Cru events. He is being mentored by an older student who has challenged him to apply to for a US-based summer mission.
Values: Fun, Friendship, pleasing his parents.
Exposures. 1. Promo material 2. Website (mobile) 3. Social Media
Hannah is a junior at a Private Christian university. She grew up in a strongly religious family and has always been interested in global outreach. There is no formal Cru movement on her campus but she is very active at her church. She has never been on a missions trip other than working at a women's homeless shelter for a week in high school. She is exploring options on how to spend her last summer before graduation She googles “summer missions nicaragua.”
Values: Missions, Evangelism, Making a difference.
Exposures: 1. Website (desktop) 2. Social Media 3. App
Kathy is the parent of Emily who attends a public university. Kathy and her husband attend church regularly and have given financially to Cru in the past. Emily is a sophomore and recently told her parents that she wants to go on a summer mission. She is considering going to Lithuania or a Daytona Beach, FL with some of her friends. Kathy assumed that Emily would be returning home for the summer to be with family and earn money for college the next year.
Values: Safety, Professional, Growth
Exposures: 1. Website (desktop) 2. Cru.org 3. Social Media
I wanted to be clear on what I was trying to do and what it hoped to accomplish. It was important to me to understand my end user and create something that would resonate with them. I phrased my problem this way:
Additionally, Cru had gone through its own name and brand change after 60 years in 2011. I wanted the summer missions brand to sync well with the current Cru brand. I believed syncing the two brands would create additional trust in the Summer Mission brand.
I began sketching out some ideas. From the beginning my thought was to create a brand that matched the design language of Cru. I also wanted each summer mission to be visually represented. This was a concept for a design system that I pitched early on:
In my first designs I tried to use either a flame or the initials “SM” I spent quite a bit of time on these but I quickly shied away from them. I did some designs that would be used as icons or even logos for summer missions in three specific areas. The feedback I received from stakeholders was very positive. They wanted to see more iconography for various summer mission categories. These came along nicely but I was missing the primary Summer Missions logo.
This proved to be the longest and most challenging part of the process. I had created a language of icon imagery to use for the summer missions categories but needed something to tie them together. It had to be general enough to encompass all the opportunities but also communicate something meaningful about Summer Missions.
I designed dozens of logos and in the end pitched two options to the stakeholders. One was triangles arranged in a circle that resembled a sun. This, of course, represented summer but also the triangles formed arrows that communicated the concept of “going” which was integral to their brand. The other, which we called the geosphere, was a geometric sphere of connected lines. This was a more abstract representation that was meant to communicate the community and connectedness experienced on summer missions.
In the end the sun shape was chosen. I think the strength of the concept was in the design system rather than the final logo. I created the final logo and all of the sublogos for the summer missions categories. I also added some illustration examples and a secondary font. All of the line weights matched the Cru logo as well as the fonts and colors.
The stakeholders were very pleased with the final concept. Initially they were looking for a logo and some colors but through my creative process I presented a design system that helped meet the need of connecting with prospective students and their parents. The designs clearly communicated the various summer opportunities and it borrowed credibility from the Cru brand. Choosing a design system rather than just relying on a logo gives the brand a lot of flexibility. Once the brand was introduced on social media there was a significant increase in engagement and the following summer just under 3,000 students participated in summer missions.
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