Case Study: A brand playbook creates a repeatable system for growth.
The challenge:
Expanding as its services were needed more than ever before, The Outreach House needed to upscale its marketing approach.
The Outreach House is one of Chicagoland’s fastest-growing nonprofits, providing food assistance, clothing, infant care essentials, and emergency utility assistance to local families.
Following the merger of several community organizations, The Outreach House had established a strong mission, visual identity, and leadership team. As the organization continued to grow, however, staff faced a common challenge: translating those strengths into consistent communication across newsletters, social media, reports, fundraising campaigns, and community outreach. They also faced frustrating logistical challenges like finding the best assets to use, establishing guidelines on how and when to post on social media, and developing systems for measuring the effectiveness of their efforts.
A grant from Endeavor Health enabled The Outreach House to partner with Stauber Brand Studio to develop a practical, affordable communications framework that staff could use every day.
We’re using the marketing playbook as a reference tool and a system. It’s changing the way we work, and the way we’re seen in the community. It’s halved the time we spend on communications work, and already we’re seeing growth in our key measurement areas.
—Catherine Lynott, Executive Director, The Outreach House
The solution:
A resource to reference as the team built their new approach.
We worked with the team to optimize existing materials, identify gaps, and developed repeatable systems the team could use to save time while developing more effective messaging.
Step one: Understanding what was already working.
Through stakeholder interviews, asset reviews, and content audits, we found that The Outreach House had many of the building blocks of a strong brand already in place:
- A clear mission and organizational vision
- Strong program messaging across its four service areas
- A recognizable visual identity and color palette
- High-quality photography and video assets
- A capable team committed to community engagement
The team had many of the assets they needed, so we helped them organize their existing libraries and identified gaps they could fill to complete their collection. Then we recommended a repeatable system that made those assets easy to use.
Step two: Examine how communication was being created and managed.
We discovered that:
- Staff were capable of producing high-quality content but had limited time and resources.
- Important assets and messaging resources existed but were difficult to locate and reuse.
- Communication responsibilities were spread across multiple team members without a consistent framework.
- New staff and volunteers had no central resource for learning the organization’s communication standards.
These insights helped us identify the gap between the organization’s existing strengths and its ability to communicate consistently at scale.
Step three: Integrate new materials and systems into the playbook and teach staff how to use it.
Based on our findings, we developed a comprehensive Brand and Marketing Playbook designed to help staff create effective communications quickly and consistently.
The playbook includes:
Brand messaging guidance
- Organizational mission, positioning, and key messages
- Guidance for communicating each of the organization’s four service areas
- Messaging frameworks to ensure communications remained empathetic, informative, and action-oriented
Content development tools
- Repeatable writing formulas and content structures
- Best practices for adapting messages across channels
- Examples for newsletters, social media, fundraising campaigns, and reports
Visual communication standards
- Simple design guidelines that reinforced brand consistency
- Approaches for reusing visual assets across formats
- Practical rules for selecting and creating stronger photography and graphics
Content planning resources
- A centralized content tracker that enabled the team to manage campaigns, social media, events, and seasonal initiatives
- Planning tools for major fundraising and awareness efforts, including Giving Tuesday
- Metrics tracking for website traffic, social media growth, and campaign performance
To support adoption, we also facilitated hands-on workshops that allowed staff to practice using the playbook in real-world situations.
After building the marketing playbook, we ran our Insight Story Studio™ training so the team could carry the work forward themselves: writing with clarity, designing with purpose. Now they’re set up to scale and to reach every audience with less effort.
Part of what’s so helpful about these trainings is the ‘why.’ You could just tell us what to do, but explaining why is really helpful, and saved me so much time. Whenever I get on a call with you, I learn something I can actually use, and it’s also a lot of fun.
—Nikki Crancer, Development Coordinator, The Outreach House
The results:
The Outreach House is growing its reach with less effort and more efficiency. Without all the frustration.
The Outreach House gained a practical communication system that aligned its team around a single approach to messaging and content creation.
With clear guidelines and templates in place, staff spent less time debating communications and more time executing them. The playbook also created a foundation for onboarding future employees, volunteers, and board members, ensuring that organizational knowledge would not be lost as the team continued to grow.
The content tracker provided a centralized view of communications activity, helping the team coordinate campaigns, monitor progress, and plan more effectively for future initiatives.
Most importantly, the organization gained confidence and lost the sense of foreboding frustration that had clouded their everyday work. Instead of starting from scratch each time they needed a newsletter, social post, report, or fundraising campaign, staff had a proven framework they could follow.
The result was a more consistent brand, a more efficient team, and a communication system designed to support long-term growth.
Looking ahead
Building repeatable, easy-to-follow systems can reduce time and effort and deliver better results.
By helping The Outreach House organize existing strengths into a repeatable framework, Stauber Brand Studio created a practical roadmap the organization can use to support its mission for years to come.
Do you need systems to support your growth goals?