Skills For Living
Location
Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Deliverables
- Identity & positioning
- Repositioning
Skills for Living supports people with learning disabilities and autism across different stages of their lives, from developing skills and confidence to employment, independent living and residential care.
As the organisation had grown, so too had the breadth of what it offered. But the story connecting those different parts had become harder to see.
Our relationship with Skills for Living began when agency4D founder Lee Ford first joined its Board of Trustees. His connection to the organisation was personal, giving us a close understanding of both the importance of its work and the challenge it faced in communicating it.
What began as a brand project started to reveal something deeper.
Different services and initiatives had developed their own identities and ways of communicating, sometimes operating more like individual organisations than parts of the same charity. The issue wasn’t simply visual consistency. The overarching purpose of Skills for Living wasn’t always clearly understood, internally or externally, making it difficult to explain how everything connected or why it existed.
The Harrogate Chocolate Factory was a good example. On the surface, it could be experienced simply as somewhere to buy chocolate or visit the café. But its purpose went much further, providing people with learning disabilities and autism with opportunities to develop practical skills, confidence and experience that could support their progression towards employment. If customers left without understanding that, an important part of the story had been lost.
Working with the organisation, we began bringing greater structure to the brand, creating a clearer relationship between Skills for Living and the different services sitting beneath it. The aim was to create an identity that could hold those different activities together while giving each enough flexibility to communicate to its own audiences.
But the work also highlighted that some of the fragmentation visible through the brand reflected challenges within the organisation itself. Creating greater consistency externally could only go so far without a shared understanding internally of purpose, direction and how the different parts of Skills for Living worked together.
At the time, the charity was also navigating a number of more immediate priorities. Understandably, these took precedence, and the brand work was not implemented as fully as originally intended. A period of significant change followed, including the retirement of the CEO and changes to the Board.
The story didn’t end there.
With new leadership and a newly assembled Board in place, Lee has since returned as a trustee. The organisation is now addressing some of the deeper questions surfaced through the earlier work, creating an opportunity to reconnect organisational thinking with the brand and communications that express it.
Our work with Skills for Living therefore continues. Rather than treating brand as a layer that sits around the organisation, the next stage is about ensuring that what people experience externally grows from a clearer understanding of what Skills for Living exists to do and how its different services contribute to that purpose.
It is an evolving piece of work, but perhaps that is the most important part of the story. A coherent brand cannot be created through visual consistency alone. It has to reflect an organisation that understands what connects it, what makes it valuable and what it wants people to understand about the difference it makes.
