The educators and administrators who make up the New Hampshire Learning Initiative (NHLI) are passionate about ensuring every student in the Granite State has access to a high-quality education, and about creating pathways for students toward a bright future. Armed with this powerful mission, NHLI enlisted Fishnet’s help in amplifying their message and bringing more attention to the organization’s presence and impact in New Hampshire. Our experience working with the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment (the Center) put us in a perfect position to deliver branding and website redesign services to another organization in the educational space.
NHLI has numerous stakeholders who all play important roles in the organization’s mission to create personalized learning experiences that benefit every student. Critical to updating NHLI’s messaging and identity was getting all stakeholders in a room for a brand workshop. Specific workshop activities helped the NHLI team identify how they want – and don’t want – to be perceived, and also defined their competition and target audiences. Our proven approach to the workshop helped align the group around these points, which can be challenging when many people are involved.
The most important step for the NHLI team was reaching consensus on their updated brand messaging and identity. We collaborated closely with the NHLI team to ensure specific elements of the website, such as a timeline highlighting the organization’s milestones and a special section for student success stories, were accurately implemented. We also created a handful of case studies to help bring some of the organization’s work into a clearer context, which we believe provides more impactful validation for the audience.
We were aware of the great work Fishnet was doing for the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, and given our own challenges with presenting a clearly-defined brand message and identity, we knew it was time to connect with them. What we have as a result of Fishnet’s work is not only a beautiful website that serves as a perfect outward expression of our mission, vision and impact, but alignment among the internal team members about how we talk about NHLI and the characteristics that truly define our brand. Having a solid footing is so critical in the educational landscape where you’re working within already-established systems, so we feel great about how far we’ve come with Fishnet’s help, and are excited to continue working with them.
Ellen Hume-Howard, Executive Director
