Birdlife Australia had an ambitious business objective to significantly grow and activate their audience base. The brand needed to evolve to support the organisation’s growth imperative and enable BirdLife’s newly developed Bird Conservation Strategy to fly.

To achieve their goals, BirdLife needed to dramatically shift the perception of the brand. This required the brand to transform from being “bland, dated, conservative and passive”, to standing out amongst nature conservation charities with a “fresh, bold, prominent and compelling” image and proposition.

Audience and market research highlighted four key audience segments, each with a very distinct and sense of ‘value’ they were seeking from the brand.

While all segments remain important for BirdLife, the biggest growth opportunity is in attracting more nature conservation lovers (NCL). The NCLs were also the segment where the brand had to do the most work as awareness and understanding of BirdLife was significant lacking in the busy habitat conservation market and against peer organisations.

The brand needed to appeal and motivate NCLs while also strengthening the bond with the other three audience segments.

After extensive consultation with stakeholders and supporters, we developed a new strategic proposition for the brand. The previous tagline of “birds are in our nature” was replaced with a more powerful promise of “Save birds. Save Life.”

The new promise is clear about BirdLife’s core purpose, saving birds, and is now driven by a clear why.  With the promise at the heart, a new brand story and positioning was crafted to engage key audiences.

Bold, positive and engaging, the new proposition shifts the conversation to the importance of birds to humans, and all life on the planet. Bird lovers and scientists have always understood how important birds are to our world. The new promise is now compelling and motivating for a much broader audience.

The new brand proposition also contains new beliefs, messaging and personality. This included a shift to a stronger and more active tone of voice. The new brand strategy now provides clarity and direction for all stakeholders to bring to life the new proposition and work together with supporters and partners to achieve the organisation’s vision.

BirdLife now has a powerful framework to inspire, mobilise and grow their audience base and ultimately achieve their vision.

Truly Deeply worked closely with BirdLife’s stakeholders and Board to consider several options to evolve the brand identity. As part of our agile design process we explored refinements to all aspects of the logo and visual identity.

As with any rebrand, we assessed the change with a risk vs reward lens for the organisation. The new brand strategy and research insights demanded that brand be bolder and more engaging to appeal to a broader audience. This was then balanced with careful consideration for protecting and maintaining a strong connection for existing supporters.

After considering options for new logos, consultation with stakeholders and existing supporters indicated a strong preference for a refinement of the current brandmark, with more focus on developing a new visual language.

The original brandmark has been evolved and strengthened with the boldening of the bird icon and a more balanced lockup of type and icon. Using a simpler, contemporary and accessible font the brand also has the flexibility to be used consistently with local groups or location names. This all works in a streamlined identity system that places the BirdLife brandmark at the centre of everything.

A new visual language celebrates the beauty of Australia’s birds. The brand now has three colour palettes; the reserved corporate palette, the bird palette and finally an active palette with vibrant primary colours reserved for activist campaigns. While corporate communications use a conservative core brand palette, other communications use the brilliant colours of bird plumage. Using the amazing photography created by members as a background, highlight colours are selected from the birds and used to create an extended colour palette for the brand. This allows us to make the birds the heroes.