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I completed my first Taproot Foundation project, an annual report for Drew Child Development Corporation. My team and I started out knowing nothing about Drew and by the end of the project, we were giving them advice on future marketing and communication strategies. As our Account Director said, aside from being a financial and marketing piece, this was “one big branding exercise.” The problem facing the organization went beyond the lack of a clear, consistent brand. They were and still are faced with a $1.8 million deficit in June as the California government cuts their budget across the board. This includes funding that would have gone to pay for Drew’s Child Welfare, Early Childhood Development, and other programs. So now they’re looking to make-up for coming loss through grants, corporate sponsorship, and individual donations. However, Drew is a community-based nonprofit with low visibility outside the city of Watts and Willowbrook, where most of their centers are located. It was recognized that they needed to reinvent themselves in order to have broader appeal, establish credibility, and build trust; they needed a new identity and we were tasked with creating this identity through design, key messages, and photography. Organizational restructuring and this annual report were just a start to what we all on the Taproot team hope is a bright, successful future for Drew.

As photographer, going into this project, I posed this question to myself: How do we better communicate visually who Drew is, what they do, and how they do it? Their previous report from 2005 primarily used stock photos of what I like to call ‘smiling faces’ as adornments to text or to fill empty space. They weren’t photos depicting actual Drew clients or staff.  While portraits and snapshots of smiling faces can communicate an end result, it does little to address what Drew actually does to reach such results. These types of posed portraits in marketing collateral do have their place in an organization that works with families and children, but they certainly should not be the only types of photos employed.

Photography in marketing should have a persuasive function. With that statement in mind, the question is: what is the most effective kind of persuasive photography? The most effective kind of photography establishes credibility in the mind of the audience. If the organization is perceived as credible, then trust is generated. The ideal effect of photos, along with information such as financials, stories, and a visible brand, is making potential donors feel confident that their funds will be used wisely and effectively. The trade-off when a donor gives money to a not-for-profit is satisfaction from knowing that their money is going to help someone less fortunate then themselves. Consequently, there is a need to visually impress upon the audience how their funds might be used and for whom.

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