Driving Grads of Life’s purpose - Rationale

Driving Grads of Life’s purpose

“Rationale are consultative, principled & creative.”
Robert Bush

Grads of Life | COO

THE CHALLENGE

Rationale works with Grads of Life (GoL), Boston-based non-profit focused on Opportunity Employment – pushing for systematically disadvantaged Americans to have access to meaningful employment.

Rationale supports raising the profile of GoL’s brand purpose, the organisation’s advisory services and key thought leaders. This includes increasing audience awareness and understanding of Opportunity Employment and its societal and business benefits.

THE SOLUTION

To understand GoL’s brand purpose, pain points and audience needs, and to allow our team to gain a deep insight into GoL’s current messaging, how they are perceived, and their existing mission and brand purpose, Rationale carried out:

    • A series of discovery workshops with the GoL teams and Senior Management, sales workshops, and one-to-one interviews with employees and key stakeholders
    • Validation interviews with GoL’s target audience
    • Market research, competitor analysis and a content and social audit.

This insight guided our recommendations to:

    • Define priority audience personas
    • Reposition and re-articulate GoL’s purpose in a way which is clear, understandable and, most importantly, made clear the business benefits of Opportunity Employment to target audience personas
    • Create a values-driven brand narrative which informed internal and external brand narratives
    • Establish a thought leadership and communications strategy.

To compellingly amplify and tell the story of GoL’s purpose, Rationale:

    • Created a values-driven narrative highlighting GoL’s role in closing the ‘Opportunity Gap’
    • Identified a tone of voice, language and approach for articulating GoL’s purpose and narrative which would speak to a B2B audience
    • Delivered a purpose-driven content marketing strategy which mapped out GoL’s story through the delivery of creative content and campaigns.

THE RESULT

Since partnering with Grads of Life, we have brought their brand and content strategy to life through the creation of thought leadership and social media content delivery, copywriting and editorial support, creative development and are supporting development of an optimised content marketing website.

Testimonials

“We've found Rationale's strategic insight and collaborative approach to be highly supportive - they are consultative, principled and creative. There's an alignment in culture which has been great, and they've taken time to gain a deep understanding of our objectives. We've found their insight to be extremely valuable and feel we've formed a true partnership.’’
Robert Bush

Grads of Life | COO

“The approach we take to creating brand narratives developed in our work with Grads of Life. We learned from our client that Opportunity Employment is an intentional way for corporate America to play a meaningful role in addressing economic injustice. We were able to combine this with our knowledge of the priorities of a corporate audience in terms of taking a purpose-driven approach to talent attraction and retention.’’
Svein Clouston

Rationale | Strategy Director