Revamping a brand for students

Founded in 1969, Chabad on Campus International is one of the largest Jewish organizations serving college campuses, with over 185 permanent branches on North American campuses, and an additional 250 globally.

The Problem

The brand was getting out of touch to their audience. Lost of trust from donors and students.

The Solution

• Rejuvenating Chabad on Campus brand and messaging.
• Redesigning the organization’s official site and individual Chabad houses sites.

My Role

During 6 weeks, I led design with a project strategist, here are some of the big tasks I completed:

• Branding Audit
• Branding Competitive analysis
• User Interviews
• Logo
• Branding Identity

Pre-Research

I made several visits to different Chabad places such as the Chabad House USC or Chabad House Santa Monica College to meet members and understand the community and environment. I performed several user interviews and informative user tests to get the maximum insights from them. With that in my bag, I was prepared to meet stakeholders and kick off a new brand more aligned to their community image.

Some user insights:

• Students rely on text messages for social events.
• Current site is too busy, they don’t know what it is supposed to do.
• Finding a local campus nearby starts from word to mouth.

Defining the brand

The brand needed credibility by maintening consistency. The solution was a brand book! It would contain guidelines to the communication habits of the organization. During a 2 day workshop with stakeholders. We brainstormed defining:

1. User Personas
2. Brand Audit
3. Brand Positionning
4. Brand Messaging
5. Brand Personality

Refreshing the logo

After sending surveys through their Facebook channels to understand how the logo is perceived and how students feels about it. I decided to give a more friendly and community feeling to it.

After several design iterations based on feedback from inside and outside of the community (See a preview of the test here) I ended up with a circle logo as a warm representation of the community around a traditional Jewish symbol: the Menorah.

This logo mark subtly uses white space to show the branches with a focus on the right parts to demonstrate positiveness and elevation.

Revamping the Website

From the old website, I gathered feedback from multiple users through usertesting.com (Preview here).

User insights I found:

• Users want to quickly get to specific information about a campus house and the Shluchim.
• The site does not clearly tell them what Chabad does on campus.
• They need to understand Chabad on Campus’ mission as an organization.
• They need a site that is clean and easy to navigate.

Using these findings, I’ve created the first draft of a wireframe for how users would see the new Chabad on Campus homepage looking like. I designed a simplified, cohesive website that took into account both the needs of the organization and what users were saying they wanted when they came to the site.

Takeaways

This project was benefitial for me talking to users in their environment. I could live through their journey and gather real insights from students and organizers. After the new visual identity has been revealed, it generated multiple new donations from donors.