A NEW BRAND & WEBSITE DESIGN FOR A DONOR & INVESTOR FUNDED LENDING INSTITUTION

In addition to a brand refresh for Community Loan Fund, we wanted to honor their history and creating a brand experience that was distinct and memorable. Our goal for first-time visitors was to convey the welcoming, friendly, and professional culture of the organization. In addition, we wanted visitors to very quickly gain a broad understanding of what the organization does and find a pathway to the services they seek.

STREAMLINING ENGAGEMENT FROM DIFFERENT AUDIENCES

Our goal for first-time visitors was to convey the welcoming, friendly, and professional culture of the organization. In addition, we wanted visitors to very quickly gain a broad understanding of what the organization does and find a pathway to the services they seek.

Different audiences require different messaging. And Community Loan Fund serves a lot of different constituencies. Our target audience work with them focused on clearly defining these — often overlapping — audiences so that we could offer them efficient routes to the information on their site that’s most useful to them.

LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS

New Hampshire Community Loan Fund provides people and communities with loans, coaching, and guidance that enables them to become economically secure. And they do this using their neighbors-investing-in-neighbors philosophy.

Over 40 years later, they recognized that the landscape in which they operate has changed. As a result, their website, messaging, digital presence, and outreach needed an update to better serve modern borrowers and the next generation of local community-focused impact investors. 

Community Loan Fund was a pioneer in the space when they made their first loan. Since then, CDFIs have spread across the US. Most of them look alike, but we took a close look at their competitors in the space, and analyzed what they were doing well, and not so-well, in terms of both design, and messaging.

BRAND CONCEPTS & MOODBOARDS

We set out to create a distinct New Hampshire Community Loan Fund brand in terms of their visuals, messaging, and leadership role across the country. 

The trick was to develop an identity using vibrant colors that conveyed energy and positivity while also feeling trustworthy and grounded.

THE BRAND LOOK AND FEEL

We put a lot into the mix to create Community Loan Fund’s new visual identity — a sophisticated color palette that’s future focused, timeless, and earthy with a nod to the agricultural roots of the area — an important audience. 

LOGO DESIGN

The four distinct icons in the crest represent housing, food and environment, farming, and sunrays. Together they encapsulate one of the core philosophies of the organization — Opportunity For All. These icons are used throughout brand marketing materials, and the website, as patterns to tie the site experience together.

LOGO PROCESS

The design system for the brand expression started with an updated logo and expanded from there. One important aspect was the treatment of the words in their very long name. In short we created a hierarchy for the words. ‘Community’ is intentionally emphasized to reflect this aspect of their impact model. ‘New Hampshire’ is de-emphasised because their work now extends beyond those borders. ‘Loan Fund’ is large because this communicates their primary activity. Lastly, most investors and borrowers refer to them as Community Loan Fund, so it makes sense for that to be the quick read of the wordmark. 

The wordmark font is also the primary font used across the site, adding to the cohesive brand system.

The icon that accompanies the wordmark hints at some of their activities and uses single weight lines to emphasize the equal importance of every aspect of their work.

BRAND EXTENSION

A rebrand isn’t complete without print collateral and related digital materials. Putting these final items together truly integrated all of the visual brand elements throughout the organization. We developed business cards, and letterhead designs, social media assets, and opportunities to create branded swag as well.

SOCIAL MEDIA LAUNCH CAMPAIGN ASSETS

We built out a template of branded social media assets for the client to use as a library when creating future campaigns, but we set them up with an initial launch campaign, and set of assets to go along with the messaging we used to celebrate some of their major milestones over the past 40 years.

ICONOGRAPHY

A mini-system within the larger brand system, the icons and illustrations used on the site communicate consistently across different pages. The illustrations retain the single line weight of the logo illustrations, but are more complex and colorful to communicate more detailed ideas.
The icons depict aspects of New Hampshire Community loans programming, and partnership opportunities.

The statistics on the site use a unique icon set as well, included in the brand ecosystem, using similar line weights to the icons in the primary logo.

WEBSITE DESIGN PROCESS

Through the wireframing process we wanted to create clear pathways for their various audiences to find the information they need. While the website is for a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), it’s much more welcoming than the site of a traditional financial institution. It’s intentionally human-centered and easy to understand. The initial written content is informative, yet light, helping site visitors quickly find what they need and dig in deep for details important to them.

At times, certain audiences and the service Community Loan Funds offer seem very similar. For example, Manufactured-home Buyers, Manufactured-home Owners, and ROC Residents (Manufactured-home communities) have significant overlap.

We devised an information flow that provided just enough description for people to self-identify and start down the information path created specifically for them.

The high fidelity website designs shaped up to feel like a walk in the verdant green, earthy atmosphere, and sunny days in New Hampshire.
Another element used across the site are image collages that harken back to the collection of icons in the crest — a subtle way of connecting photos and graphic elements.

BRAND GUIDE

With everything about the Community Loan Fund brand and website having been completely rethought, a guide was necessary to ensure that current and future team members created materials and communications that were universally on brand. Among the details we provided were: How to produce images with rounded colors, the use of background colors for photos, rules for using the watermark, and how to keep text legible on top of colors for accessibility purposes.

STRATEGIC PLAN

Using Canva, we built out a strategic plan document, which also was meant to be used as a template moving forward for future iterations of the strategic plan, or other important documents that might require visuals and a heavily branded look and feel. Canva happened to be their preferred platform (which we use from time to time instead of our typical tools for print - like InDesign), in this case, because it allows their marketing team to easily go in and make changes, leverage their brand kit, and create new versions of this and other documents for years to come.

ANNUAL REPORT

Lastly, we built out a digital and print version of an annual report for them. This beautiful print piece helped highlight their core services, and brought together new case studies to share with their supporters, and incorporated all of our new messaging work, as well as their new brand together in a lovely packaged piece, that was well received by their donors and investors.