Focusing on a counter device that creates an interactive brand experience across print and digital, the new Djantoli brand and strategy has changed the way the organisation communicates. Brittany Golob reports

Going into a pitch meeting specifically flouting the instruction to have three visual identities prepared meant a big risk for Landor’s France-based team. The agency was introducing an unusual brand system to an NGO that works in sub-Saharan Africa, then called Pesinet. The NGO had specifically asked to see multiple options from Landor and was told shortly before the pitch that it would only be treated to one potential new brand and visual identity from Landor.

“The project manager came rushing in saying, ‘I just told [development manager Lucie de Clerck] that we have one idea, not three, and she’s completely freaked out and everyone is expecting to have a choice,’” says MD of Landor’s Paris office Luc Speisser. “I called her 10 minutes before the meeting and said, ‘Believe me, there is no other option. We believe this is it and this is you and this is uniquely you. There will be nothing else because nothing else will be worth it.”

Emotions were running a bit high on both sides as Pesinet sat down with Landor. The challenge for Landor was to overcome that initial hesitation and prove its brand proposition was the solution to Pesinet’s communications problems. The president and co-founder of the organisation, Pierre Carpentier, comes from an investment background and was one of the key people or Landor to win over in its pitch.

Speisser says, “When we finished the creative and strategic presentation, he was the first one to speak and he said, ‘Oh my god, this is it.’” When his team began questioning timing, Carpentier shut them down adding, “Don’t talk about anything else, I just want to savour this moment because that doesn’t happen a lot. Let’s just talk about how great it is and how we can make it happen on the ground and no other discussions about timing. It will happen anyway because this is us.”

With that vote of confidence behind its work, Landor was free to examine the practicalities of what it presented to the NGO. According to Speisser, the new brand system is a break from the norm in both the charity and non-profit sector and for the integration of a brand’s analogue and digital communications. Landor took its direction from the belief behind the organisation and its founders.

Beginning life as Pesinet – a French portmanteau meaning ‘Put the baby on the scale’ – the NGO renamed itself to become Djantoli, a Bambara word roughly translating to ‘monitor’ or ‘carefully look after.‘ It had, for the past five years, been simplifying health care in west Africa for mothers with young children. Essentially, Djantoli is a tech provider that links families to hospitals and health workers. In practice, it tackles two problems: the fear mothers have regarding childhood healthcare and the cost associated with it, and the inability to access hospitals and effectively being outside the healthcare system. By developing a system that allows families, for the price of one meal per month, to receive visits from a volunteer who weighs young children each month and sends the data to the closest hospital, the app doctors use to receive the data monitors the weight curve for each Djantoli child. Thus, if a child diverges from the normal weight for its age, mothers will know it’s an indication of a benign disease – such as a cold – and can take the child for routine medical care, rather than waiting until that problem develops into something worse and potentially life-threatening.

“We told them that they had an amazing opportunity and that’s what you are about. To be a positive NGO means your brand can be a very positive brand,” Speisser says. “You have the opportunity to disrupt the category and you have to disrupt the category. You’re a positive NGO and you’ve solved a problem; you should talk about the solutions, not the problem.”

Landor was changing the way the organisation communicated about its work. Instead of discussing the problems with healthcare delivery in west Africa, Djantoli was advised to talk about the solutions for solving those problems. The organisation began the rebrand process with the hopes of extending its work throughout the continent and expanding its brand awareness among potential donors. “The main thing that has changed is that we have a brand strategy now!,” de Clerck says. “The idea is to communicate on the results and most importantly, to communicate in a positive way.”

From that strategic foundation, Landor’s creative team got to work on a visual identity that would be emotive and believable while representing the lives saved by Djantoli’s simple solution to a complex problem. The resulting visual identity finds its roots in Djantoli’s belief that every life counts – also the brand’s new strapline. The idea that every life preserved is an effective ‘plus one’ led to the counter device.

On print and digital assets, the number of children’s lives preserved by Djantoli are represented by a blocky, bright yellow counter. Though counters are not revolutionary in charity communications, Speisser says this one is different because, rather than counting donations or dollars received, it counts lives saved.

“When we shared the identity with them, the challenge was that it’s a nice idea, but how do we communicate the fact that it’s not just a counter, but a counter of a child?,” Speisser says. “How do we communicate the fact that this counter is not static but in constant motion?” Thus, the last digit of the counter is always represented leading on to the next number.

Landor was aware of Djantoli’s cost limitations when implementing the identity but felt confident that the three founders, who all have a background in technology, could come up with a way to use the counter across Djantoli’s digital communications, a feat that has been achieved after a few months of trialling.

“A brand is not just a logo, but your logo is more than a logo, it’s a living communications campaign of your brand,” says Speisser.But the digital side was only one aspect of the brand implementation. Many places in which Djantoli is working lack a high standard of technology and the heat of the climate can change print quality. Thus, the analogue brand needed to be as impactful as the digital. This marked one instance in which Landor had to diverge from its original plan for the brand. It had intended to use orange across the visual identity but soon realised that different printers would produce different shades of orange, it changed the colour to a sunshiny yellow – a primary colour produced the same by all printers. “We chose yellow because it’s positive. It’s the perfect choice from an ideological and pragmatic standpoint,” Speisser says.

Printed material can be customised by Djantoli employees to reflect an up-to-date counter on each piece of communications. Landor focused on the relationship between the organisation and its donors when developing offline assets. The business cards available to donor managers – a team of about three – come with a set of 20 rubber stamps, including the leading numbers, that the Djantoli employee will use to stamp each card with the accurate counter number at the time of the conversation.

Speisser says this immediately communicates to donors what the brand stands for and links the identity of the brand to the person representing the organisation. “When you give that, the first message that you send to the donor is first, you are completely transparent about the results and the efficiency of the organisation and of course, it’s a very powerful experience when you gift that card to the potential donor,” Speisser adds He says that touchpoint was crucial because it meant the brand could work in real interactions in the offline world. De Clerck points out too that the rebrand helped the organisation to clarify some of its audiences. She says doctors in the field were recognised as being an important stakeholder in the NGO’s success.

Since the brand launch in April and the website’s completion in September, donations have increased by 42%. “The first impact has been internal!,” says de Clerck. “Landor’s methodology really led all the organisation to formulate a common vision, beyond the brand...It is the first time we took so much time together to distance ourselves from the field and think about our mission.”

She adds that positive feedback externally has already impacted brand awareness and has seen positive responses from beneficiaries in the field.Speisser stands by the brand’s innovation. “The brand is a prototype of the first of its species,” he says. “It’s digital but it’s a new type of brand because the future of the brand is that it works on digital and also on very basic and very traditional business cards. This is agile branding at it’s best.”

Not only is the creative groundbreaking within the charity and non-profit sector, but it has radically transformed the way Djantoli communicates. “I think that the brand they have created for us is super strong. It is innovative, result-driven, it relates what is happening in the field. It is very simple to understand, yet very meaningful. And it is so consistent with what we feel that we are,” de Clerck says. “It tells an ongoing story of what’s happening in the field, the most important aspect of the brand is that it puts our impact at the core of the brand.”

Now, the organisation is gaining opportunities to talk about its work on broadcast news, in industry news and is gaining awareness throughout its target audiences.

It has shifted the type of messaging from talking about the problems Djantoli is facing to highlighting the solutions it has pioneered. “This is a brand that is really directly linked to what the NGO stands for,” Speisser says. “It makes them different from other NGOs and transforms every touchpoint into a brand experience to make it compelling and unforgettable.”

Sometimes a brand is a seamless fit for who or what it is trying to communicate about. That was the case with the Djantoli brand. Though Landor took an initial risk to present it and had to integrate digital with print across multiple groups of users, the new Djantoli brand, as the name says it will do for children, looks carefully after its communications.