Case Study 06
Design Driven Hackathons For Good
Spire was a design community that struck gold when we started Brandathons – 24hr design sprints whose outputs benefitted Non-Profits.
Role
Executive Director
Spire XFN Teams
Project Management, Growth, Community, Partnerships
Live Fire Exercises For Brands In Need
Objective
As a community founded on exploring the intersection of faith and design we wanted to take an in-person and online community of visual designers from a conversation about how design can be a force for good to spearheading events focused on acts of service and volunteerism.
Key Results
Spire would go on to “invent” the brandathon on both a local and national level, utilizing the talents of multiple local chapters of visual designers throughout the US. The brandathon was a brand focused hackathon-esque event — affording professional design services, resources and even visual assets free of cost to Non-Profit organizations that did not have the budgets to hire professionals or agencies. We successfully partnered with local incubators that worked with these organizations to help brand or rebrand them, in many cases improving the visibility of their work making the world a better place.
Good Design For Those Doing Good
Spire wanted to show designers and the outside world what volunteerism looked like as a creative. In establishing the brandathon, it was important that aside from just the designer acting out of a genuine passion to do good, the participating organization (that would benefit from the pro-bono design work) was already invested themselves in making the world a better place through their work. From youth football academies to afterschool creative programs in underserved communities, Spire wanted to do good for those already doing it.
No Shortchanging the Process
We did not want these Non-Profits to ever feel like second class citizens. In many ways, these organizations already suffered from that complex due to the limitations that came with having largely donor provided budgets. So early on it was determined that these brandathons would be run like full creative agency sprints, just with much more constrained timelines. We would do our best to mimic the thoroughness of agency branding exercises such as initial discovery sessions, competitive audits, mind-mapping, and of course multiple rounds of concepting and sketching. That was our decree, and 24 hours was our timetable.
F*** it. We’ll do it live.
Bill O’Reilly once famously said that best. And with only 24 hours (sometimes even less) to work with, there really was no getting around live fire exercises. Failure was never an option because for both the designer participants and the organizations, there just wasn’t enough time to not get it right. Delivering half a logo or a third of a style guide just wouldn’t cut it. Often times, mutliple teams would act as “competing” agencies to ensure that through the finessing and massaging of good ideas, the end product could be a culmination of the best of what was produced, even if some parts came from here and others from there. There was no time or room for egos. Logos, Websites, keyart and even motion graphics would be produced in record time for instant application.
Beyond The Brandathon
While these events never failed to deliver designs and assets that were ready to go live, we fully acknowledged that the needs would exist beyond just a new logo or brand guide after the event. While we couldn’t and wouldn’t commit our volunteers’ services beyond the 24 hour window - we never wanted to leave an organization high and dry. A consistent bi-product of Brandathons were the relationships that organizations would develop with our talented volunteer base, paving the way for both future opportunities for our designers and continued brand development for the clients. Often times, the brandathon was just the beginning of where these organizations would be headed with their brands.