You can’t separate your brand from your strategic plan.

When Rhea Suh was hired as CEO of Marin Community Foundation in 2021, she did what every new CEO should do: She talked to staff, donors, and local community nonprofits to find out what was working, and where there were opportunities to drive greater impact. And in 2022, she led the organization through a strategic-planning process to set a course for the foundation. Good Stuff Partners was fortunate enough to be invited to that process well before it was completed—and it was crucial to the success of the resulting rebrand. 

If you’re considering a new strategic approach to your work—whether it includes new tactics, new funding models, or new outreach priorities—you should bring your branding agency to the table, too. The sooner the better, so your brand and communication strategy is completely aligned with your organizational strategy.

The Foundation had plenty to build on: an excellent reputation, an impressive philanthropic client list, and a long history of helping the community with affordable housing, food insecurity, education, and more. Yet conversations with internal and external stakeholders revealed that the Foundation wasn't maximizing its opportunities to make an impact in the community. It was essentially engaging one tool - grantmaking - and not leveraging its voice, connections and position to fully mobilize the community. That insight has fundamentally changed the way the organization is structured, the initiatives it's pursuing and its posture.

When Good Stuff was brought in as a brand communication partner, these details were still being sorted out—which presented a number of opportunities: 

• Because brand strategy exists to support organizational strategy, the more we see the reasoning behind the new strategy, the stronger the foundation of our communication strategy and the stronger the visual and verbal execution. 

• Since we always build brands from the inside out, we typically interview key players from each department, then get feedback on early positioning and creative directions with those team members, and designate them as the brand ambassadors who will champion the new brand—the earlier we’re involved, the stronger that collaborative process. 

• As we’re partnering to create any new brand, we make sure employees have time to understand their role in expressing that brand to every potential audience—from donors to clients to corporate partners—so the earlier we’re engaged, the more we can make the brand a living, breathing tool they can use with confidence.

“Whenever an organization goes through significant change, it’s incredibly helpful to identify their new direction, strategy, purpose and values in really tangible ways that can act as a North Star to remind the staff why that change is necessary,” says Adrian Power, Co-Founding Partner & Brand Strategist at Good Stuff. “The process itself helps people coalesce and rally around that articulation, so we’re not just giving them talking points in a slide deck, we’re polishing language that expresses ideas that they actually shaped.”

In this case, Good Stuff created a brand identity with a logo that symbolizes a new dawn, and a rallying call: Tomorrow for us All™. The themes are reflected in collages that represent the communities they serve and bridge the gap between history and the innovations being fueled by the foundation's investments. The new brand reflects the ways their humanity and compassion are coupled with decades of expertise to forge a genuine connection with their audiences.

And the organization walked the talk: In 2024 MCF launched its Community Power Initiative—a three-year, $30 million program with multi-year, general operating grants designed to reduce administrative burden, increase flexibility, and quickly fuel innovative ideas throughout Marin County.

"I have been a fan of Good Stuff's work from a distance for years, watching it transform the brands of local nonprofits,” says Vikki Garrod, the foundation’s Chief of Staff & Communications. “But working with them directly revealed the power they bring to the table. Their insights allowed us to literally translate our new mission, vision and approach into a fresh, modern design and language that reflects the reality of the work. We're acting different and looking different, and they had a huge hand in that."

Check out the MCF case study and Advisor Video Series.