As you will see on our case study, we are very much proud to be a part of the Charity Angels initiative.

From the outset, it was always our intention to create branding and marketing materials for Charity Angels that were just as slick and professional as for any other job we do, delivering a great concept that people can really emotionally invest in. The very fact that we invested the time to ensure each of the 35 individual Angels illustrated has their own personality and character is testament to our attention to detail, emphasizes our commitment to quality, and illustrates perfectly our undertaking to ensure that this job was going to be the very best.

Often charity / fundraising projects shy away from this mindset for fear of being perceived as extravagant or wasteful. We are fortunate not to be in that position as we have covered 100% of the time and expense of the creative / design / artwork and much of the social media, so we were free to determine that the quality of the design would be good enough for a high-profile international brand without anyone feeling uncomfortable or concerned about it.

No sooner had the Charity Angels’ branding been created our focus switched to our first big event: The Charity Angels Fashion Show 2012. The inaugural event is going to be held at The Galpharm Stadium on the 14th June. It will be a high-production catwalk fashion show, with no expense spared – that is expenses covered in the way of free services donated by professionals, tradespeople, the public – it’s a real team effort. All the clothes modelled will be from Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice shops, and people attending the event are invited to each bring a ‘pre-loved’ garment from their own wardrobe which can then be sold on the evening.
Having established the ‘Care Share Wear’ concept the event screamed for a bit of ‘bling’ and so a stylised version of the Forget Me Not Children’s Hospice logo was born, painstakingly created from hundreds of photorealistic diamond illustrations – simply no corner cutting allowed.

Why go to this level? Long term we want large corporate sponsors to be drawn to invest in the concept. For this to be a possibility they would need to have the confidence to be able to associate their brand with our brand, with our posters, our social media graphics, and our events programmes. We needed to balance this with maintaining the appeal to smaller businesses and the general public, ensuring that they would still want to access and embrace the concept to the full.

So strictly no ‘donkey derby programme’ standard design!

P.S.

Tickets for the fashion show are available at Forget Me Not Hospice shops – but they are going fast. The Charity Angels project is always looking for goodwill support from businesses, professionals, tradespeople and members of the public. We are also always looking for sponsorship to assist with this and other upcoming fundraising events. Please email info@charityangels.co if you can help in any way.

Speaking on behalf of myself and Kathryn, we both had a great time at the Yorkshire Mafia  Conference 2012. As you will know, we did all the creative / artwork for the event- mainly the brochure and opening slides for the seminars. For more in-depth detail see our news item.
And we were certainly there in the thick of it during each of the two days. As part of the STEPteam contingent we manned the stand with our co-directors, for more on that see our entry on the STEPteam site. As well as that we managed to squeeze in a couple of the excellent talks, one from brand guru James Sommerville and the other from Facebook expert Ivan Heneghan.
One of the nice things about the event was it was a chance to ‘Tweet-up’ with some of our social media regulars-

@Charity_Angels , @faith_PR , @Ramsdens , @NorthPoleTrek , @WordsbyFK , @DavidJIsrael , @CallMeJoeCoffee , @themanforwater and many, many more!

First off, our friend Geoff Major is exhibiting there. As part of Rushfirth Creative’s ongoing commitment to the charities he is fundraising for, we are rolling his quirky yet nonetheless effective brand identity to other material. We created his full page ad in the ymc2012 brochure. And then we also created the graphics display panels for his stand. Pride of place on his stand will be the flag that we produced for him, which we are proud to say pulled in a whopping £5k in donations from generous sponsors. Please come and see Geoff on his stand at the Mafia conference, have a chat, perhaps drop a few bob in his bucket for the 10 charities that he’s collecting for.

Second off is our STEPteam material. Along with Kathryn, school speaker Jamie Tosh and entrepreneur turned personal development mentor Gareth Boot, we will be promoting our enterprise education programme at ymc2012. In order to do this we have created an A5 leaflet which will be included in the 3,500 ‘goodie bags’, we have also had to get the latest update of all our sample product all prepared and printed.

And last but not least we have created the large format exhibition graphics for the STEPteam stand. Bright, bold, unmissable. As we always like to say- the ‘wow factor’ is fitted as standard.

Finally The Yorkshire Mafia itself. We were invited to ‘brand up’ the event, the core item being the brochure. Our main ‘inspiration’ for the work was the type of late-deco posters promoting the expos and world fairs of the late 30′s early 40′s. Jumping a few decades still, we also wanted it to have a subliminal nod to 1960′s Bond movies, and bizarrely the 1960′s Dalek movies (yes I know, all a bit of a strange mix, but it works!) Once the concept was created, the mammoth task of artworking the brochure was underway. Ever meticulous, we made sure every on of the dozens of supplied images and logos were as print ready as they could be, and that every page had a real ‘designed’ look and feel about it. Uncompromising quality in design and execution is the name of our game.

We also have a leaflet in the 3,500 bags, which tells a little of our involvement with STEPteam, The BIG Gorilla Run, and the Charity Angels project- all amazing projects that we are proud to be involved with.

If you’re at the conference on either day, we’d love you to pop to the STEPteam stand and say hello. On breaks we will also be visiting the designated networking areas to talk about the project, and if anyone wants to know about our core business as a creative agency we can talk about that too.

As you may have noticed, we have been doing a bit here and there to help good causes as much as we can in the last year or so, particularly in the last few months. One such case is the work for our pal Geoff ‘Mr. Geoffrey’ Major.

The latest fund-raising drive associated with his knee-knockingly intrepid trip ‘The North Pole Trek’ was for us to produce a flag with umpteen of logos on it. Companies, from national corporations to sole traders took up the opportunity to have their brandmark featured on a unique flag which would accompany ‘Mr. Geoffrey’ to The North Pole and be waved about and photographed -  creating the most delicious Twitter treats and Facebook fodder for all involved -  not least the charities themselves.

Rushfirth Creative volunteered to oversee the entire project and filter all the logos as they came in, to process them and in many cases redraw them from scratch. So as the print deadline loomed we ended up doing a good few graveyard shifts to ensure completion. We found that with our daily workload the midnight to 3am slot has been the best way of accommodating most of our recent charity stuff.

We hope you like the result – our time on it was our way of supporting a good man doing a good thing and above all an opportunity to donate our expertise (and hours of sleep) to raise £5,000 for 10 very worthy charities. We haven’t taken a penny piece for any of it -  it all goes to the causes.

Geoff’s a great guy, doing it for all the right reasons which is the key factor for us. Please give him your support if you can and come and see him, and the flag at The Yorkshire Mafia Conference in March.

We've recently been working with a great ape who is going by the name of The Big Gorilla. He's out there working with business, helping them to see the lighter side of life every now and then and hopefully raising cash for some good causes along the way. Here's a little cartoon that we did. It has a deliberately 'flat' retro in style- I like to think of it being my own take on Captain Pugwash. But it's fun- and that's largely what it's all about.

Just a super quick post here to say there’s an interesting new blog post on the STEPtream blog regarding ‘ARE YOU READY?’ Take a look.

Rushfirth Creative, is also a big believer in the power of social media as a way of letting people know who we are and what we are all about. I personally run the Rushfirth Twitter account and the Facebook page, and as the creative / marketing arm of STEPteam, Kathy and I both run the social media side of the STEPteam business by commenting on Twitter, Facebook and the STEPteam blog.

For us, social media is something that we enjoy participating in, it’s an expression of our personalities, and it is something that we would never dream of enlisting the help of a third party for. In a nutshell, we think we’re pretty darn good at it and ‘if it’s not broke’ why fix it’.

However, the same cannot be said for communicating via editorial media. We did think long and hard about doing the whole lot for ourselves. But unlike social media, where the key is forging relationships, ‘traditional media’ is a very different animal. To do it right requires time that we just don’t have, but more importantly it requires specific knowledge and expertise that is just not part of our in-house marketing package.

This is the point at which we got on the blower to Stef at Faith PR. I’d had a few positive exchanges with ‘ @Fath_PR ’ on Twitter, and we first met up when Stef and her husband Carl came along to our Child Friendly Networking gathering.

She just seemed like the perfect fit for the way we work as a business (i.e. we like nice people) and the results that she has been getting for the ubiquitous Yummy Yorkshire speak for themselves. So we hired her.

We really like working with her (it’s mainly been Kathy who has been dealing with Stef) and she has shown 100% commitment to our project –  we could not have asked for more. Best of all the results are starting to filter through- last night a feature appeared in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, something we would have really struggled to accomplish without her help. So if you need some expertise when it comes to the art of successful PR – just have Faith and everything will turn out just fine.

As a brief prelude to our next post and news feature, we would like to wish everyone involved the best of luck for tomorrow’s STEPteam ‘Dragon’s Den’ style pitch. That goes to Gareth Boot of Boot Personal Development, and Geoff Shepherd of legendary business group The Yorkshire Mafia who will be sitting on the panel, and also to Jamie Tosh of School Speakers and Kathryn- Client Services Director of Rushfirth Creative, who have helped deliver the course last week and will also be on hand on Monday. And most of all, best of luck goes to the young entrepreneurs who worked so hard all last week and showed so much talent, passion and enthusiasm for the project. Happy pitching!

There will be much more to say on all this later on in the week- watch this space.

Three or four years ago I was brought on as a consultant for a signage manufacturer who needed a creative boost when pitching to M&B Brewery for the Toby chain of carveries. Not sure how much of the original creative made it to the final scheme- but my work certainly got them a foot in the door with a rather excited brewery, and got them sitting up and listening (I also presented the pitch in person on their behalf).

Anyway, see what you think.