It was November of 2008 and I was going through a stack of mail when I came across a letter asking for donations for the Lower Mainland Christmas Bureau. I had never heard of them and went online to learn more. Well, their website had been put together by someone who knew HTML but did not have a clue about branding or calls to action. I decided I could do a lot better than a $200 donation. So I gave them a call and learned that they are a truly grassroots organization that does an incredible amount of good. On top of that they were extremely excited at my offer to take them on as a pro bono client.

Because they had an extremely small staff of 1.5 people we had a great deal of input and control over how the brand rolled out. The primary message we wanted to convey was that the focus was always on kids living in low income households who might otherwise not get gifts from Santa. Taking our inspiration from the original show A Charlie Brown Christmas we made the identity revolve around the scraggly, bare tree and a single red ball. In the original site, when people pressed the glowing star donation button, the tree would change from bare to covered in decorations. Global News picked up on this and talked about it on the evening news equating thousands of dollars in media coverage.