Washington D.C.
brand strategy workshop facilitation + one on one consulation
Dreaming Out Loud is a Washington, DC–based nonprofit focused on economic justice, food sovereignty, and community resilience. As the organization expanded its programs and stakeholder engagement, it recognized the need for a unified brand identity that could resonate across diverse audiences, ranging from youth and farmers to policymakers and educators.
What did you do?
To support this mission, Dreaming Out Loud invited us to design and facilitate an immersive brand strategy workshop that would activate the voices of its internal team and broader community in shaping the next chapter of its story.
Insight
We co-created a participatory experience that turned brand strategy into a tool for empowerment, ensuring that those closest to the work could also be closest to the messaging.
Observation:
The people closest to the solution are often left out of the brand conversation. We designed a process that invited them back in, positioning brand not as performance, but as practice.
Session Agenda
1. Brand strategy
2. Workshop design + facilitation
3. Cultural insight synthesis
4. Vision + attributes articulation
5. Prioritized business goal development
6. User Definitions
The Big Idea
A brand strategy should act like a community garden: collectively owned, tended by many, and cultivated to nourish all.
We created a live, co-authored workshop environment where strategy was grown in real time, an experience that aligned hearts, clarified voice, and renewed purpose.
What We Did
Defining the audience
We focused our strategy on a multigenerational group of mission-aligned individuals including youth program graduates, local farmers, educators, and nonprofit staff. By designing for their voices and lived experiences, we ensured the brand could flex across grassroots and institutional contexts.
Redefining the assignment
The original goal was to “define a clearer brand identity.” We reframed this as an opportunity to design collective clarity, building a strategy that empowers DOL’s stakeholders to tell their own story with confidence.
Redefining the opportunity
Dreaming Out Loud has the opportunity to turn strategy into a shared language, bridging internal cohesion with external advocacy, and culture with cause.
Research and observations
We conducted pre-session interviews, surveyed team members, and reviewed years of existing messaging, grant language, and press. Patterns emerged around voice inconsistency, message dilution, and disconnects between internal passion and external perception. The workshop bridged that gap.
Freddy - PARTICIPANT, COMMUNITY LEADER
“This made the brand real to us. I saw myself and our community reflected in the strategy.”
A fast and easy facilitated brand strategy framework.
A fast and easy facilitated brand strategy framework.
A half-day strategy workshop that resulted in a shared vision, clarified brand promise, and participatory messaging direction, all rooted in lived experience and local pride.