Hands Together

Client Type: Orange County Non Profit, Education, Community Development, Workforce Development, Social Enterprise

Challenge: Hands Together’s goal is to promote academic excellence among preschoolers and prepare them for elementary school. They believe every child should have access to quality early childhood education regardless of socio-economic status and that such an education is crucial to their long term education and development. In Santa Ana, the graduation rate for low-income Latino children is less than 40%. In fact, the Woodrow Wilson Institute of Government ranked Santa Ana #1 on the U.S. Hardship Living index. It is a very difficult place to grow up in.

The mission of Hands Together is to provide the highest quality early education and care to families in need who are striving to gain stability, improve their lives, and emerge from the vicious cycle of poverty they face in Santa Ana.

Hands Together is committed to stopping multi-generational illiteracy and the poverty it brings by preparing children for school with our comprehensive curriculum and programs. They also emphasize parenting skills, family literacy, and health and developmental screening. Licensed, high quality, child care is available as well. Their primary curriculum not only focuses on cognitive skills, but also linguistic, physical, social, emotional and academic development. Additional components include: enriched English literacy, extended family support, and continuing professional advancement of teachers.

In ten years of rapid growth and expansion Hands Together never had someone around who could help to clarify meanings of words, titles of programs, etc. They had a very muddled hard to understand brand. Lots of good programs under one umbrella, but no clear way of explaining them. Early forays into marketing collateral, signage, web development, etc were not planned together or done in accordance with any master plan. Logos were created without lossless or layered files being created making future changes impossible. Their website, print materials and overall public perception only captured a portion of what they do and in a confusing fashion. As an organization whose largest funding source is government grants much of the copy used was written in grant language, very thorough, academic and hard to understand.

Intersection’s Approach: In collaboration with Ripe Orange Marketing a host of interventions were put in place in order to ensure long term success of future marketing and fundraising endeavors. A basic design guide was put into place ensuring that future projects, whether professional or volunteer led, would have the files, fonts, colors, etc ready to go to ensure consistency. Brochures and flyers were redone using the new design standards. Time was spent developing a strategy for describing each program within the Hands Together ecosystem to provide greater clarity.

Our primary responsibility was the design, development, content and strategy of the new website. In close collaboration with the Hands Together Executive Team, we rewrote every single page of the website, consolidated and simplified dozens of pages, put a greater focus on the impact the organization has on the community and ensured that Hands Together was in a position to continue to utilize that site to better connect with donors and the community through the next season of their growth. By getting the technology up to date and easily maintainable we were able to save them long term costs as well as provide a digital environment that encourages sharing, conversation and ultimately drives donations.

We also provided an ecommerce solution so that the Social Enterprise and Workforce Development component of their program could reach a point of sustainability. We are currently working with the Morning Gardens program to develop their product branding and packaging.