wide open

The National Basketball Players Association Foundation was founded by the Players in 1997 to advance the charitable and philanthropic work of its members. The goals of this family foundation are to improve the communities where members live and play, to provide a sense of history, tradition and lineage to the NBPA's membership, and to be a forward-thinking world-class grant-making institution.

The NBPA Foundation has existed for 20 years without a brand identity or any formal way to garner recognition for its members' work. The Foundation's identity needed to pair well with—but also distinguish its mission from—the players union as well as other organizations who regularly partner with them.

the pivot

The NBPA Foundation exists to support other initiatives as a secondary brand. Armed with this knowledge, we knew that the brand identity we built would have to be:

Flexible
Efficient
Trustworthy

The team set to work building a Brand Center for the Foundation. The Brand Center provides the Foundation and its members with all the necessary tools to effectively and consistently use brand assets and messaging, including digital marketing elements, print collateral, and more.

why DBC

A large reason the Foundation chose DBC for their brand launch was because of our approach and commitment to brand implementation. With a small operating staff, the organization needed guidance and tactics to put the brand in place. Aside from brand guidelines, DBC will continue to provide consulting, training and ongoing brand support to the Foundation.

the grind

DBC worked with the NBPA Foundation define four brand imperatives to position the brand. The identity is

For each client, we develop a mission statement internally, which helps us measure our effectiveness at the end of the project. For the NBPA Foundation, we established the following:

“DBC will implement a brand and build a platform for players of the NBPA to define a legacy and transform society's view of athletes.”

innovation on and off the court

The NBPA Foundation's brand will rarely stand in the forefront. It created a very different brand proposition to be asked to design an identity that is secondary to other brands.

Our solution to this challenge was to team the identity with its organizations and initiatives they support. This creates quite a unique Brand System.

with both a primary and secondary logo, the options are endless, but all on brand.

The Chameleon Brand allows the NBPA Foundation to through the full weight of its 450+ members behind its partners in a complementary, and (for once) non-competitive way.

A Chameleon Brand changes color and appearance when paired with another brand.

the follow-through

With the Foundation's new identity in place, we were able to build a striking web presence that performs beautifully across all devices and platforms. Of course, we implemented stationery, thank you cards, business cards, and more. As thank you gifts for the 2016 grantees, we made leather cord wraps, branded luggage tags, and used our packaging design skills with some custom paper tubes to put it all together. We even teamed up with our partners at Lazy Wrap to design custom wrapping paper!

We've also worked with the NBPA Foundation on a number of other major projects for the 2017 NBA All-Star Weekend. These included branding the movie premiere of The First to Do It (invitations, promotional items, and movie posters), #EverydayDad (optimized visual identity, website and event branding), and From, the Players (apparel). We'll continue to post on our progress solving the challenges and outcomes of these related projects.