Project story
Toucan
Over 6 months we:
- Created a brand story to open up Toucan to the wider world
- Built a content style guide to steer Toucan’s writers
- Worked with the entire team to uncover and articulate their values
- Ran workshops with key writers on Talking Toucan, their new writing style
We were more than impressed with the work you’ve done. You’ve given us a powerful guide to align not just our language, but our culture. This is such valuable stuff for a young and growing team like ours.
Raphaël Haupt
CEO
The challenge
Toucan is a first-mover. A non-profit pioneering the digitisation of carbon credits – aiming to use web3 technology to finance climate action at scale. As such, they sit at the crossroads of the voluntary carbon market and blockchain and decentralised finance. They’re a bunch of big-hearted, clever people doing very exciting work – work that just might give our living world a fighting chance.
But this is all new. Very new. So new that it’s hard for anyone not already steeped in this kind of stuff to understand it. And to have the impact they’re after, Toucan knows they need to earn the trust of a wider audience. To inspire a range of people do things differently and feel confident using the technology they’ve built. So only a few months into their young life as a company, they asked us to help them tell their story.
The work
Initially working with James Box from Berst, we began by helping the Toucan team identify and understand just who those critical audiences are – the ones they need on side to achieve their ambitions. We tapped into the brains of the founders – and we workshopped the emerging Toucan brand personality and key audience personas with people from all around the organisation.
We turned the insights we gathered into Talking Toucan – a brand language manual. This told their story: the why, who, what and how of Toucan. It captured their mission, values and strategy – as well as small, medium and large ways of describing the organisation. And it included a content style guide – a practical guide to writing for and about Toucan covering everything from tone of voice to a style guide and glossary. Once this was finished, we coached and ran workshops with key writers to help them start to turn the principles into practice.
The outcome
Our work helped create a shared sense of understanding in very new team. It reinforced the importance of communicating in a way that’s open, helpful and human to truly connect with people.
Everyone became much more aware of the importance of making the abstract real and the complex understandable for external audiences. And it drew the team together around a north star – shared values that felt real to individuals and true to Toucan.
A powerful story bringing like-minded people together and steering the way towards a better way of living on this planet.