Rebranding the First Five Years Fund

The First Five Years Fund (FFYF) holds a pivotal role in advocating for the importance of care and education for children under the age of five. Their work aligns best practices with smart policies, that recognize and advance the needs of young children and families. Energized by the significance of this mission – and inspired by tons of cute kid pictures – the NJI Media team completed a comprehensive rebrand of the organization, including a rebuild of their digital home base – FFYF.org.

Process and Approach

Through a broad Discovery process, we identified the First Five Years Fund’s primary audience groups and outlined the real-time challenges and opportunities in reaching those stakeholders. Our findings lead to the recommendation of a brand overhaul that both modernized the organization and provided a more accurate reflection of their mission, audience targets, and advocacy work.

Our initial approach to this brand design was to maintain recognition with core audiences by simply updating and modernizing the logo. However, after careful consideration, we decided to instead create a completely new look that instead paid homage to the original identity.

The Logo

FFYF wanted to retain the five shapes found in the original logo which symbolize the first five years of child development. We reimagined the then circles, as a series of complimentary blocks that organize to reveal the shape of a five. The result is a mark that is more recognizable, impactful, and unlike its predecessor, can stand alone. The design is further complemented by a new color scheme which is playful to invoke the right mood but also vibrant and dynamic to reflect the contemporary environment that the First Five Years Fund operates in.

The Web Presence

To succeed with all stakeholders, the visual identity of the organization and website needed to seamlessly connect to new audiences and also improve the experience for the tenured stakeholders were looking for a more an intuitive reorganization of FFYF’s advocacy and legislative content.

The design we created uses vivid, real imagery and video to ground the mission of FFYF, and who they support. Bright colors presented in dynamic shapes represent the inspired mission and hopefulness of the organization. The combination presents a unique, bright, and modern presentation of content.

After developing this design language for the web experience, our Strategy, Design, and Development teams completely overhauled the site’s front-end experience and organization to create intuitive pathways to all content. We further expanded and rebuilt the back-end content management system to add powerful yet manageable information architecture, searchability, content filtering structures, and other capabilities that made content more easily to find and connected related resources.

Energized by the significance of their mission – and inspired by tons of cute kid pictures – the NJI Media team completed a comprehensive rebrand for the First Five Years Fund, including a rebuild of their digital home base – FFYF.org.

If you haven’t done so already, we hope you will stop by and take a look around.