Webflow Enterprise Partner
The Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation provides college grants to 150 exceptional high school students a year. We fully rebranded the organization and created their new identity and responsive website. See It Here.
The Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation (CCSF) grants life-changing funds to exceptional high school kids all over the U.S. so that they can catapult their post-secondary plans from big to world-changing. These are kids who will one day represent us in Congress, cure diseases and invent revolutionary technologies. (No joke.)
The organization had what we'd call a "high-class problem": Close affiliation with one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world (The Coca-Cola Company), and a truckload of good news, good works, and incredible stories of triumph flowing from 25 years of Scholar alumni. What they didn't have, however, was a brand that set them apart from their big red benefactor, or a filter through which to parse which stories they told, much less where or how.
We started with story, breaking down the messaging needs of a
complex web of audiences from Coke themselves to , then created a strategic filter through which CCSF could sift and promote their wealth of achievement.
Next, we separated the CCSF brand from the Coke mothership, giving the nonprofit a complementary but differentiated way to express itself. When we looked closely, we saw an organization that served as both a mirror and a manifestation of its parent brand - showing Coke the good that it creates in the world by supporting CCSF and "being" that good in real life. Visually, we lessened the grip of "Coke Red", offered a few bright accent colors to the palette, and hauled the vestige of academic prowess in CCSF's logo — the laurel leaf — out of the dusty ivy league as a modern pattern. Our overall goal was to strengthen connection to Coke ideologically but not let the mega-brand absorb the nonprofit.
We conceived the Coke Scholars website as an exemplification of brand journalism: an experience built around story and designed to show off the organization's most impressive accomplishments. The responsive build plasters Scholar stories and social mentions all over the home page, includes a section specifically for alumni to connect with the Foundation and other Scholars, and organizes what could have been a confusing mess of application instructions and resources into neat deeper dives. For implementation, we partnered with Float Left, a web developer focused on nonprofits.
Coke Scholars themselves already had a robust social conversation going on Facebook, and the organization had dipped its toes into posting to other channels, but didn't have a formalized plan. We organized CCSF's social presence around its yearly calendar of events, celebrations, and intense, new-scholar interview process, propping up the structure with several big pieces a year alongside long-form Scholar profiles. We then helped the organization fill in the rest with day-to-day accolades, collaborations with Coca-Cola's Journeys content-creation platform and riffs on conversations happening on the closed Scholar pages. The result? Time on site is up 63%, page views have increased 110%, while bounce rate has dropped to 32%.