Between 2014 and 2019 I was fortunate enough to work on the incredible Queen’s Young Leaders Programme project.
Through a referral from my contact at project partner Comic Relief, I was commissioned by the University of Cambridge to design an extensive range of study materials to support the Leading Change project that runners-up and winners of the QYLP from across the Commonwealth were given access to.
As part of the project, I was given the opportunity to develop and deliver a module entitled Design and Branding for Non-profits. The aim of the module was to introduce design and branding to the young students enrolled on the Leading Change – and explain the relevance of both for the charitable and community projects that they had, or were in the process of, setting up.
Using a combination of my experience in the design industry and several years of teaching design theory and software to adult learners at Kendal College, I was able to produce a 64-page interactive workbook, packed with design theory, examples, activities and worksheets.
The document outlined – and then itself followed – the 7-step design process that underpins successful projects, allowing students to get involved with their own branding – from setting a brief, through research and ideation, to development, review and feedback.
As part of the project I was fortunate to work alongside several of the young leaders, getting to know their organisation and ambitions, to develop logo marks to represent their projects. One of these students – Susan Mueni, founder of MAD Sisters – followed the process from start to finish and her project features in the 2018 edition of Design Branding for Non-profits, as an illustration of how successful branding can be implemented.
You can read about the MAD Sisters design project in more details here.
After the completion of the Leading Change programme, all modules were licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. View a copy of this license here.
If you would like to receive a copy of the Design and Branding for Non-profits under the terms of the license, please email me.
