The Challenge: Community foundations have been around for well over a century and positively impact the lives of millions of people in nearly every U.S. ZIP code. Yet if you approach most adults on the street and ask them to define a community foundation, you’ll very likely get greeted with blank stares. This lack of a clear identity is a challenge for the field, to say the least. If people can’t define who you are and what you stand for, it’s difficult to inspire them to invest in your work.
The Solution: Working closely with the communications and marketing teams at more than 40 U.S. community foundations, Turn Two developed a national branding campaign that aims to raise public awareness about community foundations.
Our Goals:
To achieve these goals, we knew we needed to develop a brand identity and a suite of creative materials that would resonate with audiences at the national level and could also be easily customized for use in each community foundation’s home market.
Turn Two embarked on this campaign on behalf of the Community Foundation Awareness Initiative — a cohort of more than 160 U.S. community foundations. Through our work with CFAI, we learned many community foundations consistently struggle with the fact that potential donors and partners — and the communities they serve — are not aware of what community foundations do, what they stand for, and the impact they have.
This lack of awareness and understanding is the result of the fact that the field had never fully invested in developing a consistent brand. Instead, each community foundation uses different language to describe its work — and many community foundations struggle to tell a clear story.
In 2023, our team partnered with a small cohort of communications and marketing professionals from the network to develop a framework for a branding campaign that would begin to address this common pain point. Our strategy involved inviting community foundations in the CFAI network to co-invest in creating a research-based branding and awareness campaign. In addition to underwriting the costs, each participating community foundation would take part in the creative process and agree to allocate some or all of its 2024 advertising budget to use the campaign in its home market.
More than 40 community foundations — representing a range of sizes and geographies — answered the call and we created a 12-member steering committee of communications professionals and a 5-member CEO advisory committee to help guide key decisions.
With this structure in place, we set out to:
Our process included:
We recently completed the first year of the campaign, which included the delivery of tested creative materials that can be customized for use in each foundation’s home market and across multiple platforms.
Initial deliverables for the 40-plus participating community foundations included:
The Make More Possible campaign is being employed by community foundation partners in their home markets and was complemented by a digital and social media advertising campaign managed by Turn Two that appeared in four markets during Q4 of 2024.
Key metrics for the national campaign included:
We’re in the early stages of measuring overall brand awareness, but the initial results in the home markets of the community foundations participating in the campaign are encouraging. The 40-plus community foundation partners are using campaign elements for social, digital, and print media advertising; billboards; local radio and TV ads; and direct mail. Several others are incorporating the campaign into annual reports, signage, and events.
We’re also rolling the campaign forward to reach a second target audience in 2025 — leveraging the findings and research from the 2024 pilot campaign.
