Amnesty International: Global brand platform

A global project to redefine the brand and attract a new, energised member base

In 2018 Amnesty International was struggling to find relevance in the modern world. It’s mission (to free political prisoners) was still very necessary but there were new injustices to tackle, new challenges to overcome and its traditional member base in the West was ageing and declining.

It needed to show a wider and more diverse set of people and geographies that it was on their side and ready to fight for them.

The objective

As Strategy Director at Blue State Digital I led the project to give Amnesty International a new purpose, mission and reason to believe that could be used by all its global sections to energise a new member base and increase sign ups.

This was particularly important in the global south, where Amnesty International was facing resistance from local governments and where its member base was significantly lower than in the west.

Our solution

In contrast to pitches from other agencies, at Blue State Digital we opted to take a very internal/external approach to re-energising the brand, involving global Amnesty sections in helping to co-create the brand in order to achieve buy in across the globe.

A co-creation approach

Our approach was based on a series of co-creation workshops with Amnesty sections around the world and the target audience in key geographies in the global south.

We held three day-long workshops in Madrid, New York and Nairobi, with section members travelling from all over the region to participate. Our focus was on finding it what section members thought Amnesty International should stand for, where its strengths and weaknesses lay and what they thought their members wanted and cared about.

We then asked the teams to create mood boards and co-create new campaigns and positioning for Amnesty.

Additionally, we held workshops in Nairobi for young Amnesty and non-Amnesty community members to find out what they needed from an organisation such as Amnesty.

We turned our findings into four brand territories to work through in a final day-long workshop involving section leads in London.

At the end of the process we had a final brand platform to develop into a set of brand positioning and messaging that could be used globally.

Result

Amnesty International was delighted with our work and reported that all the sections felt involved with the process, newly enthusiastic about their work and were confident in using our brand platform and messaging pillars in their communications.

Sections reported that a refocus on humanity and human rights gave their work a focus, a robustness and a way to steer clear of polarising language and mission creep that might alienate much of their member base. Our platform is still being used actively by sections globally.