For more than a decade, the organisations that became One World One Family had concentrated primarily on doing the work rather than building a brand around it.
Across nutrition, education and healthcare, trusts and foundations had grown organically in different countries and at very different scales. Some had substantial operations of their own; others worked through partnerships with organisations already doing good work locally.
That growth created something valuable — but also increasingly difficult to explain. Individual organisations had their own names, logos, colours, typography, websites and ways of speaking. From the outside, it was not always obvious that they belonged to one mission.
By 2024, the next stage of growth required greater clarity. The founder asked us to begin thinking seriously about brand and communication: how could this diverse network be understood as one credible, cohesive humanitarian mission without losing the work and relationships that had grown organically over many years?
Simplify before you standardise
The challenge was bigger than designing a new identity. There was also a great deal to communicate. As the work expanded, simply explaining what the mission did could become complicated because there was so much activity to cover.
My contribution was largely one of translation and simplification: helping turn the founder’s vision into clearer direction, helping different contributors work from the same understanding, and gradually turning that thinking into something practical.
We spoke with people from trusts, foundations and countries to understand what they needed. We looked across the existing brand landscape and communications. I brought designers who had been working in different parts of the organisation together so we could begin operating more like one team.
Because communication could not stop while the permanent identity was being developed, we also created interim guidelines to reduce immediate inconsistency.
Use outside expertise to sharpen the thinking
We met with a number of branding agencies and eventually worked closely with an external agency through the strategic exploration. That process was valuable in helping us test ideas, simplify our thinking and build greater alignment with the founder around what the new brand needed to represent.
The agency has continued to contribute broader branding perspective and advice as the work has evolved.
The visual identity itself was ultimately developed internally. I translated the founder’s direction into a more specific creative brief and worked with a specialist freelance designer to explore and develop the concept. Our internal design team then refined the work before it was approved by the founder.
It was a collaborative process, with leadership, the agency, the freelancer and the internal team contributing different things at different stages.
A soft launch — then the harder part
The One World One Family identity was soft-launched in July 2026.
But a brand does not become useful simply because a new identity has been approved. The work now is to make it usable across a mission with people in many countries, organisations and working arrangements — including staff, volunteers, vendors and partners.
I am currently building a web-based brand guidelines resource and developing the standards with our communications leadership. At the same time, we are working through practical questions from countries about websites, materials and how the identity should be applied in different contexts.
The next stage includes workshops, training and direct support for the people who use the brand.
Where it is now
This case study is still in progress.
The aim is not perfect uniformity. It is to make One World One Family easier to recognise, easier to understand and easier for people across the mission to represent well — without creating a system so complicated that nobody can use it.
For me, that is the most interesting part of the work: taking an ambitious idea about becoming one global mission and helping turn it into practical decisions, tools and behaviours that people can actually use.