A brand-new coat: Dot Project’s new narrative and visual identity

The term ‘brand-new’ goes back to the 16th century. It refers to the newness of an object — fresh from the fire, forge, or furnace.

In this blog we share our journey towards a new narrative for Dot Project.

2022 was a full-on year for many of us. Stepping out of 2 years of intermittent lockdowns, we were trying to make sense of what had happened since 2020, whilst picking back up ‘normal’ life and working rhythms.

For us at Dot Project, 2022 felt like a furnace. It was a year of sitting in the fire. We were running at 100 miles per hour, delivering and co-delivering services without being able to talk about them as succinctly and consistently as we would have liked to. Sometimes it even felt as if our collaborators and clients were better in describing what Dot Project was doing than we, ourselves.

As we invited more collaborators and members into the co-operative we realised that the Dot Project was changing slowly, different stories emerged, different hopes and dreams started to live alongside each other. We operated with a feeling of shared purpose but without a connecting mission. We were growing without a solid business plan. We were navigating uncertainty like the rest of the world. We were adaptive and responsive, with a lot of testing and learning but slowly it started to feel as if we were losing our focus little by little.

It became clear that we needed to collectively reshape our story and envision who we are together. We started near the beginning, reconnecting to our Original Myth. The Original Myth is a concept borrowed from Organisation and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC). An Original Myth is the shared story about our earliest experiences together. For organisations and start-ups the Original myth is often referred to as the ‘founder story’.

In our case, it was a wonderful opportunity to invite Annie and Cat as Co-founders to share their origin dream and partnership story that led to founding Dot Project. We heard stories of care and bravery. We then explored our Myth Change — what had we been doing over the last 7 years, what had shifted and what do we want to be doing in the future?

We spoke with many of our stakeholders across the social economy to understand what they valued about us. We asked them to share their stories and paraphrase what Dot Project offered and how we operated. Each story came from their own experiences, from what they heard from others, and from their expectations. We learned that we needed to create more clarity around the story. We aspired to create a consistent experience with every conversation, every workshop, and presentation — a narrative that people can remember and recount with ease.

We reminded ourselves that a brand lives in the many stories and experiences of the people around it not in strategy documents or delivery plans. In order to find the magic and logic that made Dot Project unique, consistent, and memorable we ran a high-intensity 2-week Brand Story Sprint with Ivan Pols from Truth and Spectacle. We debated, we listened, and more often than not we laughed together. When we got stuck, we learned that it was helpful to switch the context, stop thinking so much and make space for feelings and senses. We discovered qualities of Dot Project that felt like a strong cup of tea, like jazz with well-timed expressive solos or like reassuringly strong brown paper.

The process of crafting our brand story helped us crystallise not only our value to the system but also our proposition to the system: charities, organisations, collaborators and funders. It resulted in a much clearer vision and mission for us:

Vision: We envision a world where the lives of individuals and communities are enhanced by a thriving social impact sector.

Mission: We strive to help social organisations build their digital resilience and confidence, so they can deliver on their vision.

It also shaped our narrative of how we work:

To deliver against our mission we use two levers: Technology (systems, tools and data) and Teams (collective confidence, collaboration and governance).

Our journey towards a new narrative showed that our work has always been deeply influenced by our understanding and acceptance that humans are beautifully messy. We’ve always known that to deliver against their vision, organisations must focus on both their technology and teams. So we seek to support as much on systems, tools and data as on the actual relationships that teams hold with these technologies and with each other.

This narrative provided us with the bravery to take the second step; to reimagine our visual identity and how our brand looked and felt.

We felt that we were wearing a coat that didn’t fit anymore. There is nothing wrong with our current coat. It is a sensible green coat that demonstrates trust, expertise and clarity. But we were now ready for the Dot Project version of the ‘Technicolour Dream Coat’.

We realised we had already started to ‘hack’ our brand identity by using Google slide icons to bring humanity and connections into our presentations and workshops. Then, our Christmas cards designed by the fabulous Chrissie Nicholls from Inkpot and Pen brought a new connection and lightness to our identity. We yearned to weave this into our proposals and documentation.

Our beautiful Christmas cards by Inkpot & Pen

So we went for it. We wrote a brief and set out to find a brand design agency to help us find our very own Technicolour Dream Coat. We found that partner in Fran and Francesca from AndGood, a collective of designers doing projects for good.

Next week we will share how our coat was designed and in the coming weeks, we will re-launch the brand for all to see! Keep an eye on our twitter and linkedin to follow our journey to finding our visual identity and if any of the above makes you want to share your experiences, drop us a note at hello@dotproject.coop!