Branding Workshop, May 2019
Harvard College Dean of Students Office
PROJECT ROLES: Graphic Designer, Workshop Facilitator
To celebrate their first year as a new organization, the Harvard College Dean of Students Office (DSO) wanted to host an engaging retreat where they could define their brand story and connect with each other informally.
Workshop Brand Identity and Design
Working alongside the Dean of Students, I designed presentation slides for the staff retreat. I chose a summer camp theme for the slides to set a fun and playful tone for the day’s activities.
Staff retreat logo design for introductory slide.
DSO mission slide.
Dean of Students’ ice breaker exercise slide.
Annual highlights slide.
I designed a set of handouts for the branding workshop and placed them at the center of a round table for each group to use together.
Handouts for workshops 1, 2, and 3. There were approximately 60 people at the retreat, so we needed a series of collaborative exercises for small groups that could guide department-wide discussions.
I printed the handouts on recycled paper with earth tone shades to continue the summer camp theme.
Brand Voice Development Exercise
The Dean of Students Office was planning to launch a new website in the fall 2019, and I was the product owner. We were preparing to enter the copywriting stage of the project and needed stakeholder input to determine the tone. Using tone of voice guidelines from Nielsen Norman Group, I created an exercise so that all stakeholders could contribute.
Presentation slide for Brand Voice Development Exercise.
We gave each group a blank branding worksheet and a series of colored dot stickers. We asked them to collaborate to decide where to add the stickers on the brand voice worksheet.
Brand Voice Exercise Takeaways
We determined that the DSO brand voice would sound:
Friendly, but not too casual - we want to be approachable
Modern - we are a new organization building new experiences for students
Cutting edge – our staff are innovative and use data and the latest research to guide our decision-making
A mix between fun and serious - we plan enjoyable programs for students but we also enforce policies which requires a more formal tone
Excited - we’re enthusiastic about our work and about supporting students
Conventional – we follow expected standards
After the workshop was over, I used Photoshop to combine all of the responses into one visualization to share with the department.
Brand Pillar Exercise: Scategories
Shortly after the Dean of Students Office was formed, the senior team developed a set of values that defined the organization: inclusion, collaboration, integrity, and excellence. I designed the scategories exercise to see 1) how staff transformed these values into actions a year later, and 2) how staff would like to see these values incorporated in the future. We hoped to use the programs, events, and topics identified during this exercise to guide the department’s messaging strategy.
Exercise 2 introductory slide.
Slide outlining the DSO brand pillars.
Example of the pillars exercise in action.
After groups had time to add post-it notes to each category, each group shared key concepts from their sections. I typed up the terms on each group worksheet and shared with all staff after the workshop.
Examples from the workshop:
Inclusion – WiSTEM, Lavender Graduation, equitable practices and partners, Race Relations tutors, active listening
Collaboration: Gender inclusive housing, best practices, goal-setting, specialty tutor programs
Integrity: Reflective practice, annual report, responsive, consistent
Excellence: Student Leadership Awards, meaningful programming + learning outcomes, assessment/new assessment approach, advising student leaders @ fellowships
One Page Handout Branding Exercise
The Dean of Students wanted to create one page handouts to describe work of each department in DSO. This activity helped us build a language library for marketing materials while playfully testing staff knowledge about their colleagues’ work.
Each department was asked to sit together for this exercise.
Our senior leadership team chose the winners for each exercise.
Each team received a packet of questions. I included a set of questions for each department along with questions about DSO as a whole organization.
Teams from Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Student Engagement, and the Houses wrote taglines for the First-Year Experience Office. The card at the top was written by the First-Year Experience Office.
Teams from the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion team, First-Year Experience Office, and the Houses wrote taglines for Student Engagement.
Teams from the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion team, First-Year Experience Office, and the Houses wrote taglines for Student Engagement.
After the session, I typed up all of the responses and shared them out to all departments for use in their communications materials. We are currently using the results from this workshop to finalize the one page handouts.
Reflection: This exercise ended up being the most successful of the three – it brought up the energy in the room and staff genuinely seemed to have fun doing it. Mostly importantly, we gleaned a lot of high quality content to use to describe each area.
Example: Responses for the signature programs for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.