One year on since we became With You
How our new brand helped us in a pandemic we didn’t know was coming.
We changed our name and brand to With You on 26 February 2020. Life in the UK was about to change with a virus we’d hardly heard of. No one yet knew what a pandemic of this scale could mean for a charity like ours that directly supports thousands of people every week, more often than not, in our physical services.
I led the 18 month rebrand project. Looking back now it came to fruition in just the nick of time. It took so much work from people all over the organisation, changing so many services and systems, launching new digital channels and engaging our partners. If our new brand had been due to launch even a few weeks later, inevitably we would have needed to delay the whole thing.
I was, quite literally, called out of our rebrand evaluation meeting, to join a coronavirus planning group. And for me, like everyone, how to respond to this virus would suddenly dominate the next year.
How are these two things — our rebrand and the pandemic — linked beyond the coincidental timing? Across both of them is a very singular question, which is the guiding goal of our organisational strategy. How do we help more people get the support they need?
Here are some key lessons I’ve learnt from this experience — inevitably about leading a rebrand process, and more surprisingly, about how this came to the fore in the pandemic year that was 2020.
‘I want to feel welcomed not judged’: a clear purpose for the brand
It sounds simple, almost obvious now, to say that for us the key objective of our rebrand was to encourage people to get support with drugs, alcohol and mental health.
But it started out with many more questions. Should we also focus on what would appeal to future supporters? What about policy makers or volunteers? The reason behind every rebrand is different. But I’ve seen that it’s very easy, for charities especially, to inadvertently dilute the strategic purpose of their brand. While a number of audiences are vital in a charity doing its work, trying to prioritise everyone can result in a brand that doesn’t have focus. Or it can result in a long, slow rebrand process that takes many years and swallows resource as it tries to achieve too many objectives.
For us, the singular and compelling reason to rebrand came from what people using our services told us about how daunting it can be reaching out for support, and the impact that negative labels from society can play. “They tar everyone with the same brush,” said someone we worked with in one of our services.
Often there was a big gap between what people expected services to be like and their actual experience. They said our previous name, Addaction, sounded institutional, judgemental or strict: ‘It is really hard sounding and not very warm — doesn’t sound like a nice place.’ Another person said, “From the name I think it is for hardcore addicts, I don’t see myself in that kind of way”
But people described our staff and their support as warm, non-judgemental and inclusive. We previously had several sub-brands with a different name for our mental health services, but across every type of service, the experience that people using our support described was the same: ‘Other places made me feel like a number, but here it was about me.’
This reflects what some of our staff had raised. Staff members said, “We should have a brand that starts to make it feel more personable. Make it mean something to people.” And: “we need a brand that makes it ok to ask for help”.
We know that, sadly, millions of people go without treatment for drugs, alcohol and mental health. For example, only 1 in 5 dependent drinkers are accessing any kind of support. Within this, different groups such as young people and people from black and minority ethnic groups are under-represented. As another example, women make up only a quarter of the drug treatment population.
When I took on leading the rebrand I quite ruthlessly stress-tested the idea that our name and the way we communicate could really help us to widen the appeal of our support. As well as listening to people using our services, I invested in research to objectively understand how people with lived experience who hadn’t sought help responded to language and visuals around these issues. We needed to find out what would make it easier for people to engage in treatment. I attended internal and external focus groups directly to hear for myself what people said about their experience.
What I heard reinforced wider discussion in our own sector and beyond, about the power of person-centred language. Fear of being labelled prevents people accessing support whereas focusing on the person and what they want to achieve is both respectful and empowering.
We were embarking on a rebrand to help more people. Everything we did would focus on that.
Agreeing that decisions will be based on evidence
Once we had a clear purpose for our rebrand, it was crucial other people understood this and what it would mean for how we’d make decisions.
We agreed upfront that there could be no subjective decision-making on the brand we ended up with. No single person, be they senior leader, staff member or trustee could subjectively decide on the new name, the colour or any other element of the brand. Every human brings preferences to this, myself included. We were aware we needed to ‘future proof’ the brand for the long term against any of us who just so happened to work here right now.
Instead, I asked people to agree to a key principle — that all decisions would be made on the evidence of people looking for support. We’d test different potential brands with high quality qualitative and quantitative research, and I’d only bring forward one option for approval when the research told us we had it right.
The day I saw the full research presented back on With You versus other potential brands and names we tested (including our existing brand), I knew we’d hit something special. Truthfully, I was secretly hoping for another option, a case in point of the subjectivity problem! It was striking how everyone we needed to connect to — both young people and adults across all ages and backgrounds — had responded to With You.
Research respondents said: “I would actually go to this one, it’s just asking you to talk’, “It makes you feel like you’re not alone’ and “I think it’s very inclusive and non-judgemental. It’s positive and welcoming”.
This was what our charity needed in its name — something that would encourage people to take that first step and to ask for support. And something that gave a strong, signal to the outside world that we work in equal partnership with the the people we support, who don’t deserve the negative labels they told us was causing so much damage.
Our quantitative research was stark. It showed people were 3x as likely to choose With You for support than our previous brand Addaction. And they saw the attributes in this that people using our services say they see in our staff. It scored better on feeling warm, human, supportive, approachable, and non-judgemental.
Discussing the change with so many people
Even when you have such clear evidence for a change of name and brand, no organisation on the planet is going to shrug its shoulders and tell you to crack on, without some much-needed discussion.
My colleagues, many who have worked here for a long time in our services, rightfully needed to interrogate why the organisation they were passionate about would focus resources on a brand change. Was it worth it? What’s wrong with what we’ve got now? Is this really a priority when there are so many things we could do?
People who lead big changes think a lot about the idea of the different stages of change for people who will be affected, and prepare for questions and concerns. My background is in communications, and I was aware that this is a change that people will really feel, as it’s about identity and belonging. I still wasn’t quite prepared for how much emotional energy so many discussions would take.
The best moments came when I could get in front of people personally, and show them the research with people from our own services and people we want to support. I cared deeply about the same things my colleagues did. I hope people saw that, and how much everything was based on listening to those who needed us.
The questions and discussion were vital because it was our group of around 130 service and team managers who led this change expertly in their area. They did this over a period of around three months. In this time, they talked through the name change with local partners, engaged staff teams and made sure that people using our support were updated before the public change went live.
Working as a team to deal with the unexpected
A small number of internal staff made up our brand project team. Our approach was to make sure we led the rebrand ourselves — we didn’t want to ‘outsource’ the whole thing. My colleagues led workstreams including everything from making the change happen across IT and systems, our digital team building our new help and advice website, to the plan on how to support services to rebrand easily and cheaply with our small central budget.
We used external expertise in just two of our eight workstreams searching hard to find small, friendly partners who shared our values and were happy to work in collaboration (thanks Humankind Research for working with us on the research and Touch design studio for working with us on the brand identity).
Despite having a clear roadmap for how to achieve everything we needed to, inevitably we had to stay flexible. We had several days in that last month for example solving supply chain issues on items like lanyards for our 1000+ staff as coronavirus started to disrupt things. When you’re rebranding an entire organisation across hundreds of assets something like a lanyard being late can sound small. But in the first week of the new brand we knew that having the new lanyard in the hands of our staff, and new appointment cards ready for people using our services, would be one of the most tangible things that would make us feel part of this new identity.
By this point the project team were well-used to solving problems and supporting each other to get us over the finish line. Remarkably, as we’re spread across different cities, the brand project team only ever met face to face once — on the evaluation day after the 18 month project. We didn’t realise everything we’d learnt about digital collaboration and video calls was about to come to the fore. Lockdown arrived within weeks, and we entered the next phase of embedding the new brand in a different environment to what we’d imagined.
Did our rebrand work?
It’s only now, one year on, that we can really start to answer this question with enough data to show what is happening.
At the point of the rebrand, everything we measured was based on ‘intent’ — people telling us they’d feel comfortable calling up a charity with this name v this name, and what kind of place they imagine it to be.
We’re now seeing evidence of the impact — our new help and advice website has had 50,000 extra visits over the last year. It now, for the first time, sees as many women as men visit and double the number of young people. And there has been a 50% increase in the number of people getting support via on our online webchat service.
It’s hard to be specific about how many of these changes are driven by our new brand and website, and how many are driven by the way so many behaviours have changed in the pandemic. Our physical and digital services evolved to help people more remotely in extraordinary ways — having an inclusive and accessible name and brand came at just the right moment to help us adapt so effectively and stay connected with people throughout this time.
‘Brands’ shouldn’t be a separate concept to the work people do but feel a cohesive part of the day to day work. It has been amazing to see the brand come alive across the charity. Staff used the With You message powerfully to help people know they weren’t alone when coronavirus meant many of our physical services had to close their doors and help people in more remote ways.
The pandemic has really put a spotlight on why we did this. We continue to show people all the time, however hard these dark times get, we are With You.
These are tough times for everyone. Our services are open and we’re here to work alongside you during this difficult time. Visit our website for information and advice, to chat to a trained advisor or to find your local service.
