When you’re busy trying to lift more than a hundred million people out of poverty, stepping back to assess your brand isn’t easy. Yet if it was to fulfil its goals for the future, Bangladeshi NGO BRAC knew it needed an identity that could pull its weight. Frank Sutton reports

In the world of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), there’s big and there’s big. And then there’s BRAC. Since 1972, what began as a small-scale relief project aimed at helping Bangladesh overcome the devastation of the Liberation War, has grown into an organisation of jaw-dropping proportions. Employing more than 120,000 people, 61% of whom are women, it works with more than 110 million people across Asia and Africa. In its home country of Bangladesh alone, BRAC is active in 70,000 villages, reaching three quarters of the entire population.

Yet as the organisation’s size had mushroomed and its aims had evolved, one thing had stood still – its brand. After almost four decades, the time had come for a serious refresh. Ishraq Dhaly is BRAC’s global brand manager. “We had a series of aims. We wanted to expand into more countries, we wanted to attract new donors and we wanted to tell people in Bangladesh about the way BRAC had evolved, about the organisation it had become.

“These days we don’t just support development programmes, because we know this doesn’t allow poor people to break free from poverty. There also needs to be an element of social enterprise. So we link our development programmes with social businesses. This message was largely not known in Bangladesh.”

To understand what he means by ‘social enterprise’, take the example of a farmer. Other organisations might give that farmer a cow and walk away. But BRAC’s approach will see them go on to build a supporting infrastructure – milking parlour, milk bottling plant – so the farmer can use his cow to make a living.

Look at the figures and you soon realise just why BRAC was so keen to shout about their model. By reinvesting the profits from their social businesses, they are 80% self-sufficient, with just one fifth of their cash coming from donors. In a sector that is perceived as endlessly going cap-in-hand to the giving public, this is no mean feat.

“BRAC had told us they were looking for evolution. But when we had reviewed the brand identity, where we got to was more of a small revolution”

The challenge now was to find a branding agency up to the job of doing the BRAC story justice. Having looked at a number of options, it handed the brief to CDT. “CDT had relevant experience,” explains Dhaly. “They’d done some non-profit work. For example, working on ActionAid. This was important. We wanted an agency who understood both the business aspect of how we operate and the non-profit side of things.”

Work kicked off with a hard, honest look at the existing brand. Dhaly again: “We re-looked at the whole identity, starting with our mission. A huge amount of research was done, including visual audits and stakeholder communications. CDT spoke to our board, our donors, our partners. All this was done to get to the bottom of what makes us stand out.”

CDT’s managing creative partner Neil Walker picks up the story. “I spent a lot of time over in Bangladesh getting under the skin of what BRAC is about. And when you get below the surface, you see that the things they’ve done are incredible. They were responsible for getting the age of consent changed from 12 to 18. They have an amazing 99% return on microfinance projects. They’re almost the best-kept secret in the world of NGOs.”

Gushing stuff, but Walker wasn’t about to get distracted from the scale of the task ahead. “BRAC had grown so, so fast. But their identity was born out of the 1970s and their profile was incredibly low. The old brand was incredibly fragmented. There was no consistency across any of the different communications channels. And the number of different identities running was phenomenal.

“BRAC had told us they were looking more for evolution than revolution. But when we had reviewed the brand identity in its totality where we got to was more of a small revolution.”

At the core of the new brand identity is the refreshed logo. One of its key jobs was to communicate the BRAC model (of doing more than just giving that farmer his cow and walking away).

Walker provides more detail: “Their model is a virtuous circle and that’s what the new mark needed to reflect. The old logo was based on four people holding each other’s wrists. But it looked more like restraint than freedom.”

Dhaly concurs: “We liked the idea of introducing an organic feel, a sense of things flowing into and flowing out of the organisation, to match our culture.”

Another crucial design consideration was – indeed, always has to be these days – the nature of modern communication. “We are now in the age of social media. modern brands are not just about print. Print is dying. We were doing more and more of our communications with our external audiences through social networking. The new brand needed to be easy to use across things like blogs and Facebook,” says Dhaly. 

Walker adds to this. “Because there are so many communications platforms these days, marks are now designed for the lowest common denominator. That means they need to work on small mobile devices and on the web. Choosing a single core colour - magenta - means the new mark is very easy to reproduce.”

In choosing magenta, Walker explains that he was inspired by the dominant colours of the countries BRAC is active in. “If you look at Africa and Asia, the use of colour is very different to the west. They have a great eye for colour and are not scared to mix colours up. Our research showed us that the underlying colours in the regions were things like magenta, oranges, acidy greens, bright vibrant purples.”

For an organisation with its eye on international expansion, the next task was to make sure the new brand was translatable. As a result, the new logo only ever appears in English. “If you think about large brands, they communicate very simply. Nike wouldn’t change its name into Bengali,” says Walker.

Dhaly was on the same page: “We knew we needed a set of brand guidelines to make usage consistent. We used to have a Bengali mark and an English one. Sometimes BRAC would appear at the side, below, above. There were no guidelines to work with. There was lots of visual disarray.”

However there was one more ingredient to this process, one which could have derailed the new design at any stage. That ingredient was employee buy-in. Dhaly explains: “Before we decided on the final logo, we took the opinions of all our staff, from the drivers to the top executives.”

But there was more to their internal communications than asking for a thumbs-up. They did get this thumbs-up – and from almost 90% of employees - though their plans for their own staff were bigger than this.

Dhaly explains: “We didn’t want to do a re-brand that looked great to the outside world but which was bare internally. We very deliberately made sure the roll-out was done inside, then out.”

Walker concludes with a similar sentiment: “It was really important to hear the views of employees. They have to take ownership of this. Then they have to communicate it, so it’s crucial that they buy into it from the start.”

Peter Matthews, nucleus
Once a good thing starts happening, other good things start happening which reinforce the good things you started to make happen in the first place. That’s what I think creates a virtuous circle and I sincerely hope CDT’s work for BRAC self-propagates, creating an increasingly beneficial cycle of awareness and communication benefits, even though the new brand mark is, well, er, not exactly original or typographically finessed. For me, that matters less than usual, as long as the process of establishing a strong identity helps this organisation achieve its many and often urgent goals.

Michael DiPaola, Studio North
I quite like this identity - it’s inclusive, contemporary and simplistic enough to engage diverse audiences. It also has a lovely balance absolutely screaming integrity. Yes, very neat indeed and plenty of brand values boxes ticked.
The natural flow and anticipation of rotation could quite easily be clockwise or not, efficiently communicating the inward and outward relationship offered by the brand. The agency have got this bit absolutely bang on but I’m wondering where it goes next. The identity seemed lost in the context I viewed it, sat awkwardly in a non-aligned space within a very rigid, square boxed and compartmentalised website. Totally at odds, but maybe this will evolve given that the logo itself is effectively futureproofed for a digital and mobile world.