World Vision is renowned for pioneering child sponsorship. But while it’s a vital cause, the non-for-profit’s initiatives are actually far broader. What’s more, World Vision’s competitors started to imitate their comms style, leading to a loss of cut-through and differentiation.

We needed to find a way to communicate the huge range of work World Vision actually does, and set them apart from a sea of copycats. So instead of focusing on the now-standard themes of loss and suffering in the world, we decided to empower our audience to become Change Makers.

Beyond simply reminding people about child sponsorship, we’d help them understand that with our help they can tackle a myriad of issues and projects, breaking poverty down cause-by-cause, bit-by-bit, until it feels like something we can all work at and solve together.

We had our idea, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. There was one more problem – we couldn’t lose any of World Vision’s trusted brand assets. But as it turned out, the perfect device was already waiting in their toolkit, just waiting to be unleashed.

Their logo has long included ‘the Beacon’ – a bright (and orange) symbol of hope. We realised that by separating The Beacon from their logo, we could elevate its role and use it to draw attention to the various causes, supporters and people that World Vision supports.

With the Beacon acting as a guiding light, the new identity highlights how we can all become Change Makers, and work together to provide crisis support, end child labour, stop the spread of viruses like Zika, train nurses, boost literacy and so much more.

The brand has only just launched, so it is too early to see any quantifiable results. However the qualitative feedback from clients, customers and media have been very positive.