Students wearing newly-branded t-shirts

With the help of a Micro Grant, ROIer Tamar Wisemon enlisted the assistance of a professionla graphic designer to create the perfect visial representation of her organization.

How do you explain an interconnected set of values in a simple way? 

Some organizations can be easily described and nearly categorized into Jewish Education, Pluralism, New Media or Environment.

Others, like Sviva Israel, which I co-founded in 2007 with my husband Carmi, bring together so many different facets of social impact that it is a challenge to compress our work into a neat elevator pitch. As Steve Yastrow explained to me at the ROI Summit 2011, “Your key challenge in recruiting supporters for Sviva Israel will be ‘Do they get it? Once they understand how you bring everything together, they will want what you offer.”

Our logos have been a classic example of our multiple identities.  We started with a $10 investment in a stock image of a globe, to which I added our name in Hebrew and English to reflect our environmental, Jewish and Zionist goals.  Two years later, our cutting-edge Eco Campus virtual platform and social network demanded we move up a notch with a professional, crowd-sourced logo that was colorful and start-up-savvy, but it had little connection to Sviva Israel.  Meanwhile, our Eco Connection program, which incorporates the Eco Campus, video conferences and live events in an environmental educational bilingual program has become Sviva Israel’s key project, spreading steadily across three continents, thirty schools, and impacting thousands of young teens.  And that hasn’t even had a logo!

With three brands (Sviva Israel, Eco Campus and Eco Connection) and an upcoming set of T-Shirts to be printed (celebrating the winners of our school T-Shirt design contest), we were in dire need of a new logo--one that represents who we are today.  

We turned to No’a Gorlin who suggested we apply for a Micro Grant to work with a graphic designer that ROI Community often works with - Elad Naftali of HaStudeo.  Elad recommended we focus on the Eco Connection since it is this program that directly touches so many people, including high school and college students, teachers and families, and has become our most recognizable identity.

From our initial meeting in person and through countless emails and phone calls, Elad has persevered to produce a young but classic logo that reflects our organization’s key nature – bold, environmental and connected (note the typography of the ”e” that highlights our use of New Media to connect  kids around the world).

The very day it was finalized, the logo was sent to the printers and is now being worn by Eco Connection students across Israel and the US.

Just as our organization’s identity continues to evolve and mature, so too our logo has one final step to go. Playing on a pluralistic mix of colors, we are just waiting for Elad to find the perfect shade of blue to represent Israel.  Our logo looks great in monochrome, but just wait until we burst into color…