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A new, values-driven visual identity 

Published: 7 Jun 2023

By Catherine Gregory, Head of Marketing & Communications at Working Families.

As the UK’s national charity for working parents and carers, it’s vital that Working Families’ brand helps to drive our mission and reflects the people and employers we work with every day.  We have developed our new look and feel to support our objectives of empowering working parents and carers, supporting employers, and driving meaningful policy change.  

Our new visual identity—informed by listening exercises with internal and external stakeholders—is anchored in our values, especially that of being collaborative. The speech bubble mark that you will see throughout our new branding reflects the vital and impactful conversations that drive our work to remove the barriers that people with caring responsibilities face in the workplace.  

Here’s an inside look at how we developed our new visual identity. 

Working Families logo 2023

Background and aims 

Refreshing our visual identity has been the culmination of a multi-year repositioning of the Working Families brand.  In early 2021, we launched a new organisational strategy with a new mission, vision, and values for the charity.  We were keen that our visual identity – which had not been updated since 2003 – reflect our new values, the new direction of the charity, and the diverse audiences that we support. 

From a practical perspective, our old visual identity was dated and lacked comprehensive guidance and design elements that would have allowed it to be more cohesive and consistent.  The marketing and communications team was often creating assets and sub-logos on the fly. In order to have a look and feel that our employer members would be proud to use and that our donor base would be proud to support, we knew it was time to invest in our visual identity. 

Overall, our aim was to develop a new look and feel that would help us reach more of those who need us most, increase our impact, and reflect who we had become as a charity: an organisation that is collaborative, inclusive, practical and driven. 

The Process 

We started our visual identity refresh by gathering data and insights from our key stakeholders.  We surveyed our employer members and our current and potential supporters, the majority of whom are our core audience of working parents and carers. 

We also held workshops with our staff team and our board, which helped us identify challenges of our current visual identity and opportunities for the new one.   

We compiled our insights into a creative brief for Cole AD, a family-run design agency in Scotland that shares our values of collaboration and inclusion. Cole AD sent us several concepts and using our organisational values as a guide, an internal cross-team brand committee chose one concept and refined it alongside our designers until we arrived at the final product. 

How our new look reflects our values 

  • Collaborative: The speech bubble replacing the ‘m’ in ‘Families’ reflects how our work is based around vital conversations with parents and carers, employers, and policymakers.  This mark features widely in our visual identity – it’s a symbol that will come to be associated with our brand.
  •  Practical: Our new visual identity allows us to showcase our three distinct but interconnected areas of work using dedicated colours for our work with parents and carers (red), our work with employers (purple), and our policy work (teal). We also have three new taglines that unify these areas with the main brand.
  • Inclusive: We have used colours that are accessible to people with a variety of visual impairments, and fonts that are accessible to those with reading difficulties.
  • Driven: Our new visual identity is polished, but packs a punch, and reflects our professionalism, passion, and trustworthiness. 

What’s next? 

We may look different, but our commitment to helping parents and carers thrive at home and at work has never been stronger. Alongside our re-brand, we are refreshing a few of our key initiatives. We have opened up a new, more inclusive Changemaker scheme, allowing any regular giver to become a Working Families Changemaker, no matter the monthly amount. And we will soon be partnering with the Government’s Flexible Working Taskforce to refresh our Happy to Talk Flexible Working logo and guidance, which will give employers the tools they need to design flexible jobs at the recruitment stage.