Hello Forums Community,
The Marketing and Communications team really appreciate the honest feedback around our new brand and have written the below which hopefully will give a bit more context to the decisions that have been made.
When SANE launched its new guided service and strategic plan last month, we saw it as a great opportunity to refresh our look, to rebrand our organisation. We wanted our public face to reflect our new direction and renewed energy, to let the world know that we were ‘the same SANE but different’.
With an agency, we conducted a brand review: consulting the SANE community, conducting surveys with service users including Forums members. As well as consulting lived experience organisations and looking at the branding of other mental health organisations. The conclusion was that SANE was lost and barely distinguishable in a crowded mental health sector. Our website looked like other mental health websites, our pamphlets merged with other pamphlets in the waiting room rack, our logo was not widely recognised. This was unwelcome news for an organisation wanting to reach as many people who need support as possible.
When we listened to the SANE community, they told us being diverse and inclusive was important to them. Championing the voices of people with lived experience and fighting stigma distinguished us. We heard SANE described as ‘open’, ‘welcoming’, ‘courageous’, ‘outspoken’ and ‘life-changing’. We took all this into re-branding the organisation.
Brand projects are a difficult balance between taking feedback and progressing work. We want to avoid having ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’ while also incorporating feedback from across several stakeholder groups, many of which have different ideas for what SANE should look like. We solicited ongoing feedback from lived experience organisations, SANE services team, our directors, staff and board, and more, trying to give voice to stakeholders across the entire organisation. We understand the Forums community would’ve liked to be more involved and we apologise that some in the community felt totally excluded from the process.
The new logo and branding are bold and unmistakable because this is how our community sees us. The new logo with its stretched-out 'N’ is distinctive and our new font is strong and loud, suitable for an organisation speaking out for people with complex mental health issues. The multi-coloured blocks grab the attention, but also reflect the diversity we believe in. Inclusivity and a sense of community, as well as diversity, are encapsulated in the portrait images that humanise the design: they look like real people, not models, not stock images, like someone you would know. Thus, our new tagline: 'We're people like you.’
When we launched this new branding last month, we knew it would not be to everyone's taste. While the response has been largely positive, we've been open and receptive to criticism. Some of the colours were too bright or garish; some headlines felt a bit too in-your-face; some elements didn't read easily on certain devices; and print materials required a different approach to things published electronically. The changes to the forum pages particularly affected our community and we will continue to take suggestions for IT and tech solutions to make the forums comfortable and accessible for everyone. Indeed, we are still adjusting all the new branding elements, looking for the right balance while learning how to optimise their impact.
It will take all of us a little time to get use to the new look, but we're sure you'll come to see this bold, distinctive brand not as a collection of fonts, logos and visual elements, but as something familiar and recognisable, representing the bold, distinctive values of SANE.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and to reiterate, we understand the frustration from the community regarding being consulted on these changes.
In the meantime, we welcome your comments and suggestions: content@sane.org.
