Bringing the softer, intangible elements of teaching practices to life through an intimate brand experience
Simple Education Foundation
Context
Bringing carefully designed tools and frameworks for teachers in govt classrooms
Simple Education Foundation (SEF) works with governments to build state-wide training programs for school teachers and principals to make learning in public schools across India more engaging and impactful for children. They co-design processes and frameworks with government institutions and educators to enable them to implement and scale the programs by themselves in the long term.
SEF has partnered with 4 State governments, impacted nearly 1.2 lakh teachers, and over 540 govt education department officials.
Need for Documentation
Enabling teams to tell powerful stories
When SEF reached out to us they were at a place where they were growing rapidly. They have a growing team of diverse, passionate, and dynamic members and have built a nuanced culture that balances ambition with care and intimacy. They wanted to preserve and reflect this culture in their brand and external communication as they grow.
SEF approached Studio Subu to help them build their brand in a way that authentically reflects their work and culture. As a part of this exercise, they wanted to rebuild their website to showcase the impact of their work to funders more effectively.
Our work with SEF
Building a strong narrative that honestly reflects programs and their impact
We started our narrative exercise with SEF with an immersive research leg to understand their work, their culture, goals, and perceptions. Our goal was to bring out the honesty and authenticity of their approach in the narrative, and clearly articulate their process and impact.
The SEF team was actively involved in the building process. Our focus was to capture, formalise and simplify the essence of how teams articulate and talk about the work.
When team members spoke about the work, the one thing that strikes you is the passion and empathy that they bring to every conversation. There is a deep sense of care and thoughtfulness and a very rigorous research process that goes into developing programs and tools. In addition to simplifying some technical concepts and frameworks, and jargon, a big focus for us was to formally bring these softer tones of care and intimacy to the narrative.
The brand narrative was built first with inputs from several team members working across geographies and roles. The narrative would then be used across the organisation, to help members quickly build and put out any communication pieces without having to re-write/rebuild from scratch every time. This also ensures consistency in the content and the tone of all material that is published.
Designing a website that showcases SEF’s work, brand and culture
When designing the SEF website, we kept in mind its playful and warm personality alongside the depth and scale of its work. We used a combination of clean, simple design and powerful, dynamic photos to bring out SEF’s work and approach to educational equity.
We used hand-drawn doodles and illustrations on the website to reflect the personality of the SEF team - this really resonated with the team when they saw it
Enabling team members to seamlessly use the brand narrative and assets to their advantage
An in-person training was carried out with the entire SEF team to share some tools and tricks on how to craft and share powerful stories. Most of these team members are interacting and communicating with stakeholders daily. Our goal was to help them streamline their process on how to make choices on which aspects of communication they can focus on to make their daily interactions more impactful.
The toolbox which took the form of a digital pocketbook, was aimed at helping teams have quick access to key themes and pillars that ground the SEF brand, along with tools and tips to help them build and present material to stakeholders.
