Givelify
Givelify Rebrand
Transforming a digital donation platform through heart-centered brand strategy
2021
When I joined Givelify as Creative Director in 2020, the company was experiencing unprecedented growth, driven by pandemic-era digital giving. But despite processing millions in donations, they were operating with an amateur-looking brand that had been created years earlier in someone's home office. Multiple agencies had tried and failed to deliver a rebrand that resonated with the founder CEO's vision. The challenge: transform a functional donation app into an emotionally resonant platform that makes the act of doing good as rewarding as it should be.
Roles, Tasks
Brand Strategy, Creative Direction, Design, Design System Development, Cross-Functional Leadership, Team Enablement
The Challenge
Replace the amateur brand with a professional system that could scale, emotionally connect donors to the act of giving, and provide operational consistency across marketing and product touchpoints.
Givelify needed a complete brand transformation that could finally translate the CEO's long-held but difficult-to-articulate vision into reality.
The challenge was multifaceted. The existing brand felt sterile, generic, and lacked human qualities or emotional connection to the act of giving. With no formal brand guidelines, the team was essentially "treating each project like we're starting from scratch,” leading to operational inefficiency and brand inconsistency. Beyond aesthetics, the rebrand had to navigate a complex stakeholder landscape. The CEO was highly opinionated and emotionally invested (having founded the company and holding significant equity), yet had difficulty articulating his vision in terms others could build upon. This dynamic explained why multiple external agencies had failed to deliver satisfactory work in previous attempts. Additionally, the brand needed to work across two distinct audience segments (religious organizations and nonprofits) and differentiate from competitors in the digital payment space (Cash App, Venmo, Facebook Fundraisers, GoFundMe) that offered similar convenience but lacked Givelify's specialized features like tax reconciliation tools and nonprofit integrations. Success required not just design excellence, but also strategic stakeholder management, cross-functional collaboration with Product Design, and the creation of scalable systems that a small team could maintain long-term.
Strategic Approach
Strategic positioning workshop defining brand architecture and emotional benefits
I began with intensive strategic positioning exercises, working closely with the CEO to decode his vision and translate it into actionable brand architecture. The breakthrough: reframing the product not as a transaction tool, but as a platform that transforms good intentions into generous actions.
The strategic foundation centered on three core insights from our positioning work:
1. Emotional Over Functional:
While competitors focused on transaction convenience, Givelify would emphasize the intrinsic emotional benefit: when you do good, you feel good. This insight shaped everything from the heart symbol at the center of our brand mark to the vibrant orange color psychology.
2. Simplicity as Strategy:
The brand needed to embody Givelify's core value proposition: making giving as simple as "tap, give, done." This drove decisions around a clean, accessible visual language, straightforward messaging, and an illustration system designed for consistency and scalability.
3. Cross-Functional Integration:
To avoid the typical brand-vs-product design silos, I employed what I call the "IKEA Effect" strategy: involving the lead Product Designer hands-on in logo development so the rebrand would feel like something we created together, not something handed down from marketing. This collaborative approach was critical for seamless adoption across both marketing and product touchpoints.
The strategic approach also prioritized long-term sustainability. With a lean team (~300 employees, small creative team, limited budget), every decision considered scalability: Could different designers replicate this illustration style? Would this system work with our existing tools? Can we maintain this without constant external agency support?
Key Strategic Decisions:
Orange over blue: Chose a vibrant, memorable color that would be instantly recognizable on crowded phone home screens, avoiding the sea of blue payment apps and rejecting red for its warning connotations
Heart-centered identity: Placed a heart at the core of the brand mark to symbolize the emotional connection and circular nature of doing good
Scalable illustration system: Created simple, replicable illustration guidelines with clear rules for shading, positioning, and composition that any designer could follow
WCAG accessibility standards: Ensured all colors met accessibility guidelines for inclusive design
Modular design system: Built a flexible grid-based layout system that could adapt across digital and print applications
The Breakthrough Moment
After intensive strategic work and collaborative design sessions with the CEO, I presented three distinct brand concepts that all resonated strongly, marking the first time in years that Givelify had viable rebrand options to choose from.
The process began with that critical strategic positioning work, translating the CEO's difficult-to-articulate vision into clear brand architecture. Through working sessions, we crystallized the positioning around "doing good" and the emotional benefits of generosity.
Rather than a traditional linear agency process, I took an integrated approach: working simultaneously with external contractor Michael Jewell (a former colleague of mine) on brand guidelines production while collaborating with internal Product Design on logo development. This parallel workflow was essential given the aggressive timeline.
The breakthrough came when I presented three fully developed brand concepts to the CEO. His response captured years of frustration finally resolved:
"I love all three! How have we worked for so long, with so many agencies, and never gotten anything worth using, and now you're making me choose between three options and I love them all!"
This validated the strategic groundwork—by deeply understanding his vision through positioning exercises, I translated what he couldn't articulate into multiple viable directions.
Execution:
Finalized comprehensive Brand Guidelines (~40 pages) and Messaging Platform
Built token-based design system in Figma for product team
Partnered with agency KPS3 for website (3-4 month timeline)
Launched "Bravo Stories for Good" video series
Created enablement sessions educating teams on strategic intent behind decisions
Throughout this process, I maintained a strategic emphasis on empowerment over micromanagement. Given the small team size and aggressive timeline, I couldn't oversee every detail. Instead, I educated team members on the strategic intent behind design decisions, enabling them to apply that thinking autonomously to unanticipated scenarios.
The heart symbol represented the beating heart of generosity and the circular nature of doing good. Vibrant orange stood out on crowded phone screens without the warning connotations of red. Every element balanced emotional warmth with functional simplicity, designed for real-world scalability by a small team.
Brand System & Deliverables
The final brand system introduced vibrant orange branding centered on a heart symbol, comprehensive guidelines for voice and visual identity, and a scalable design architecture that worked seamlessly across marketing communications and in-product experiences.
The visual identity system centered on a dynamic, heart-forward logo mark in Givelify Orange, a vibrant, energetic color instantly recognizable on phone home screens. The heart symbol reinforced the emotional benefit of generosity: when you do good, you feel good. The brand architecture employed a modular grid-based layout system that provided structure without sacrificing flexibility. This system extended from digital applications (website, email campaigns, social media) to physical touchpoints (business cards, brochures, branded merchandise). The comprehensive Brand Guidelines document (~40 pages) covered logo usage, color systems, typography, composition principles, illustration guidelines, photography direction, and tone of voice. The companion Messaging Platform provided positioning statements, core beliefs, key messages, and a complete lexicon for consistent communication. Perhaps most distinctively, we launched the "Bravo Stories for Good" video series: high-production-value content filmed on location with nonprofits receiving donations through Givelify. These videos weren't just marketing; they embodied the CEO's vision of Givelify as a platform for celebrating and amplifying stories of generosity.
This project demonstrated strategic stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration. Success meant breaking through years of failed agency attempts by investing in positioning work upfront and building genuine collaborative relationships. The rebrand's sustained impact validated the approach: strategic thinking first, execution excellence second, always designing for real-world constraints.
Achievements
"I love all three! How have we worked for so long, with so many agencies, and never gotten anything worth using, and now you're making me choose between three options and I love them all!"
— Wale Mafolasire, Givelify Founder & CEO
The rebrand earned a Gold ADDY Award, achieved +32% increase in positive brand sentiment, and successfully unified Givelify's brand across touchpoints—ending operational inefficiency and delivering on the founder's vision.
The redesigned website won a Gold ADDY Award in 2021 for Consumer Website—the only show entered (100% success rate). Post-launch metrics showed +32% increase in positive brand sentiment, shifting perception from generic payment app to emotionally resonant giving platform. The comprehensive guidelines eliminated "starting from scratch" on every project. The collaborative approach with Product Design paid dividends—by involving them in logo development, we avoided brand-vs-product silos and enabled seamless adoption. Internal reception from ~300 employees was overwhelmingly positive. After years of amateur branding, they finally had a professional identity matching their ambitions. Most significantly: succeeding where multiple agencies had failed over several years validated the strategic approach of investing deeply in positioning before execution.
Brand Sentiment Improvement
External Budget
