Campaign for the New USS Constitution Museum
What we did
- Campaign Messaging
- Campaign Naming
- Campaign Source Deck
- Campaign Visual Identity
- Case for Support
- Discovery
Campaign Size
$50,000,000
Celebrating old and new
We’re helping the USS Constitution Museum enter a new era — branding the most ambitious fundraising campaign in its 50-year history.
It’s an established, successful museum in Boston. And it is the only museum dedicated to the USS Constitution, known as “Old Ironsides.” This campaign raises funds to move the Museum alongside the Ship and into a new state-of-the-art facility – and launches it as a world-class, national destination museum and civic center on Boston Harbor.
Our challenge was to help align diverse stakeholders behind a campaign brand to complement and refresh the institution’s brand – yet be powerful and descriptive enough to stand on its own. The brand had to excite and coalesce the Museum’s fundraisers before ever reaching out to potential new donors. And energize the entire endeavor.
Imaginations set sail
Through our discovery process and Campaign Messaging workshop, we worked closely with the Museum to clearly communicate its vision to transform how Americans experience history. From it, the brand theme, Charting A Bold Course, took shape – nodding to the Museum’s naval and maritime history while looking ahead.
We created a Messaging Guide building language and creative around those ideas. Then, we developed a Case for Support the entire team could rally behind, which became the campaign’s compass, expressing a strong, compelling voice for the Museum and its goals.
A bold new look
Next up? We created a campaign Visual Identity worthy of a new world-class museum and civic center. We turned up the visual volume with bold fonts, imagery, and strategic logo placement to unify the non-profit’s traditional brand with the campaign’s distinctive design elements. The new look embodies the USS Constitution Museum’s campaign ethos as bold, inspiring, enriching, historic, and welcoming. Our approach aligns with our partners’ goal to keep communications relevant and impactful over the life of the campaign.
Logo anchors all
Once we hit on the campaign name, we wanted to make it stand out with a logo mark that the new USS Constitution Museum could own. Our approach delivered: infusing the Charting A Bold Course theme with visual heft that says new, nautical, and historic in a single symbol. To do it, we pushed our strong typeface even further and transformed the letter ‘A’ in “Charting” into a modern, stylized nautical divider. An ancient tool for navigation at sea now stands for the Museum’s experience, imagination, and leadership as it evolves into a national landmark.
