One of my major strategic priorities at UpStart this year has been to increase my department’s capacity for devoting time to higher level brand and marketing work. Like most marketing teams, our biggest obstacle to having that capacity has been responding to the day to day program and development needs of the organization: recruiting for specific programs, creating regular touchpoints for our donors, and governing our brand–that is, reviewing and editing the team’s communications for brand alignment, making sure they have the assets they need, and facilitating graphic designer relationships.
To reduce the amount of time our department spends on these types of tasks, and to build the skills of the rest of our team(!), I developed a digital Center of Excellence.
What is a center of excellence? Wikipedia defines it as “a team, a shared facility or an entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training for a focus area.” Corporate COEs, much like quality control and assurance departments, tend to be whole teams of personnel that serve the wider organization to ensure that best practices are consistently followed. Our new COE follows that same philosophy, only as a digital platform that offers the same value.
Now, equipped with the templates, tutorials, and brand assets they need, all UpStart employees are empowered to create their own communications, design their own materials, and so much more… without sacrificing quality or brand-alignment. This frees the Brand Strategy department up to focus on bigger picture items!
The COE is a living resource. My goal is for it to increase in its usefulness to the team over time, as – almost like an algorithm – it learns what the team needs and values most. As we learn, we’ll continue to update, add to, and refine its offerings.
Currently, our platform, designed and hosted in Airtable, contains:
- Intro to the COE: how to work with the Brand Strategy department, how to know who to go to for what sort of request, and how to use the COE platform
- Communications Calendar: a daily-updated calendar which both plans and tracks all organizational communications, from email campaigns to social media content
- Tutorials: a robust library of video instructions, detailed guides, and gifs, such as “how to work with a graphic designer” and “how to treat images in Photoshop”
- Templates: letterhead, business cards, Powerpoint templates, program outreach kits, and more
- Brand Assets: all of our organizational and program-specific logos, fonts, colors and their hex codes, graphics and patterns, stock images, staff headshots, and swag design files
- Collateral: a library of our foundational materials, such as our Case for Giving, our Theory of Change, and one-pagers for each of our flagship programs
- Brand Trainings & Resources: a collection of webinars we’ve produced on brand strategy and marketing, documents detailing the thinking behind our Experience Design (XD) strategy, how to develop audience personas and journeys, etc.
- Platforms & Logins: access to digital platforms such as Photoshop, Canva, and WordPress
- Testimonial Bank: a robust collection of testimonials and stories from our program participants, organized by program and date, and fully searchable
- Designer Stable: a list of graphic and web designers we work with, along with their contact information and rates
- The UpStart Dictionary: a list of shorthand terms, acronyms, and Hebrew and Yiddish terms used frequently on staff; an important bookmark for new, onboarding team members
- Digital Marketing Metrics: the latest stats on our email list and social media following
Choosing to develop this resource was a huge commitment and could not have been done without a team of awesome, dedicated staff. But our department – and UpStart as a whole – is already seeing the benefits of having this resource handy. Non-marketing employees feel empowered to manage their own communications with excellence, and they have gained innumerable new skills that will benefit the rest of their work and that they can take with them anywhere. The Brand Strategy team now has the ability to focus, and to put the pedal to the metal on our strategic priorities: to define and drive the big conversations in our field, to tell compelling stories that offer value and inspire affinity, and reach and grow our audiences like never before.