People's Media Fund
Message Agency had worked with the Independence Public Media Foundation for several years, first redesigning their website and later exploring a renaming and rebrand. The result—the People’s Media Fund—is a brand, visual identity, and online presence that reflects how this young organization is making a bold impact in Philly media and arts.
The foundation, born from the transformation of WYBE Channel 35 into a private philanthropic organization, was evolving rapidly as they worked to better understand their communities, how to best serve them, and how to “do the work” themselves to build trust as a grantmaker through equitable and inclusive practices. An earlier attempt to rename surfaced important questions about organizational identity and alignment between board and staff. Working closely with foundation leadership, we stepped back to let those conversations unfold. Over a year later, with clearer alignment on values and strategic direction on the board, we restarted the brand work together. The timing was right for a process that would live up to their commitment to participatory decision-making and shared power.
"This rebrand was shaped by community voices... this identity belongs to them as much as it does to the organization." --Jamila Medley, People's Media Fund Board Chair
The Challenge
Emerging organizations often encounter a similar challenge: how to define who they are, what impact they seek to make, and how they wish to be perceived by the communities they want to work with.
With the People's Media Fund, this moment of definition was important and an opportunity for the foundation’s stakeholders to align. Our challenge was to determine a long lasting brand strategy that could serve an evolving foundation, and create a site that centers grantees as well as raise the foundation’s visibility among Philly media creators and fellow media funders.
Our Approach
Audience Research. We started where it mattered most: with the community. As we do with nearly every Message Agency project, we start with a comprehensive discovery process. We talked with internal stakeholders, and conducted several user research interviews to inform personas that represent the priority audiences: grantees, partners and the philanthropic community.
Our initial step was to validate that a name change was warranted using a survey that asked grantees, partners, and stakeholders how they felt about the current name and identity. The data gave the board the confidence to move forward with a deeper exploration. We then conducted 12 in-depth interviews with grantees, philanthropy partners, consultants, and board members, and surveyed all staff and board to understand the full range of feedback on the name itself and experiences with the foundation that inform how the community thinks and feels about their work. What emerged was clear: people wanted a name that signaled the fund's real commitment to democratizing philanthropy and amplifying the voices doing transformative narrative work across Greater Philadelphia. A name and brand that matched the boldness and vibrancy of the community.
Name and Brand Development. To begin ideating, we brought staff and board together for collaborative workshops to explore their vision for a liberatory future and their role in working toward it. Our approach was intentionally gradual, moving from open discovery and word associations to more focused concept development, and finally to actual name options that aligned with the themes that resonated most strongly.
Visual Identity. Our visual design team was embedded in this process from the start, so the brand strategy and visual identity evolved together. The bold colors and vibrant design that eventually emerged captured the joy, collective power, and radical hope that defines this work.
Website Refresh. We completed our work by applying the new identity to a website we had originally redesigned, retaining all of the underlying architecture and form factors but updating the aesthetic to reflect their vibrant, new brand.
Telling the Right Story
From these conversations and our branding work, a story emerged about power and who most often holds it. It was essential to demonstrate how the People's Media Fund was working to shift the power back to the media creators and industry experts, and what is possible when people, specifically LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, are able to tell their own stories their way.
The foundation and its website are on a journey to center and best serve their users. We say journey here, because that is a key part of who they are: a group that’s committed to learning and evolving.
Making the Right Connections
Grantees need to be able to easily determine if their work fits into what the People's Media Fund supports, who their grantees are, and what type of projects have been funded before. The network of people and organizations that the Fund convenes is a valuable part of its DNA that needed to be showcased just as much as the funding itself.
We asked the foundation to think about how to define what types of projects they fund and how to organize it into easy-to-understand grantmaking groups. The following grant programs materialized: community storytelling, digital equity, journalism, and film.
To navigate the complex network of grantees and projects, we used taxonomy—grant program, grantee type, and focus areas—to make connections that users would find most valuable. Users can search all projects or all grantees, see what grants a grantee has been awarded on on their profile page, or browse all projects that fall under a grant program.
Importing Years' Worth of Grantee Information
When People's Media Fund first came to Message Agency, their web presence was simple with no record of grantees and their work for users to search. The history of the foundation’s grantmaking is important to document for the public so users are able to see the full extent to which funds were distributed from year one to present day.
The Proof is in the Community
The community response told us everything. People thanked us for how we ran the process and thanked the foundation for prioritizing their inclusion. They saw themselves in the result. As Board Chair Jamila Medley put it, "This rebrand was shaped by community voices... this identity belongs to them as much as it does to the organization." The People's Media Fund now serves as an accountability mechanism that holds the organization to its promise to be truly "for the people." By centering community voices from day one, we helped the fund prove they walk the walk, building deeper trust with the communities they exist to serve.