Brand Governance made easy for Teenage Cancer Trust

With BrandStencil launched as a key part of their intranet, with just one-click employees can log in and start working on their challenge event promotional material; with everything from customisable social media tiles to email headers and follow-up reports.

Challenges

For Teenage Cancer Trust a key part of their fundraising strategy is around promoting challenge events but the design team were finding that a lot of their time was being spent working on the ‘small stuff’ and overseeing brand governance.

They came to BrandStencil to find a more time-efficient approach and to empower the teams within their organisation to create their own artwork based on pre-designed templates. This would not only reduce any waiting times for the users in their organisation and give them instant artwork but also free up the design team to work on the bigger, more creative projects, safe in the knowledge that their brand was being protected.

Solutions

Working closely with the design team we created a set of templates to cover the most frequently requested and simple artwork their end-users needed. This included social tiles, newsletter images, google ads, posters and more. These were all created with predefined fonts, colour gradients and logos to ensure their brand was protected and consistent throughout, whilst still giving the user freedom on specific image and text fields.

Picking out the headline

The capitalised block text used by Teenage Cancer Trust is one of the most recognisable aspects of their brand and something they were particularly keen to manage, as it had proved more difficult in the past to govern.

We built a specific ‘block text’ template, where users could create up to 3 lines of block text with a predefined font, character count and an option of colours. This artwork then exports as a PNG with a transparent background, so users can pop this on artwork they are creating outside of BrandStencil without having to struggle with fonts.

Creating a flexible on- brand general documents & report template

One of the most frequently requested yet time-consuming work for the design team to create was a general document or report. This could be anywhere up to 8 pages and could be requested from multiple teams in the organisation. We took on the challenge of turning this into a template and created a general document template which is on-brand, easy to use but still flexible enough to be used by many different teams.

To turn this into a template we planned a series of most common ‘layouts’ and gave options to switch around images and text within for ultimate flexibility. We added in pre-set themes which included gradients and colour options which would filter through the whole report when chosen and could be updated at any point, whilst keeping the set font, font sizes and logos the same. We also enabled up to 8 pages to be added with a blank page being inserted if an odd number was created to ensure it stayed even for professional printing, as this was the most likely outcome.

Using Single-Sign On to create an easy login process

We also worked with their IT team to integrate BrandStencil into their Sharepoint intranet, offering a single-sign on link so their users only had to log in once with their usual credentials. This was key to their onboarding and engagement strategy, as we know from experience that having to log in twice and remember different details can be a barrier in getting people to use a new system.