Rabble Mill was formed when The Bay and Hear Nebraska merged in 2017. In the seven years that followed, the organization suffered from fractured brand recognition, confused audiences and even more confused employees. In 2024, I helped guide the co-founders towards a strategic rebranding from Rabble Mill to The Bay, which clarified who we are and unified our story.
I led the communications strategy and rollout, working closely with other leaders on the team and cross-functional partners.
My team delivered a customer and stakeholder-centered full website rebuild, updated visual branding, refreshed messaging, and launched assets that helped staff, board, partners, and the public quickly understand the change.
Click on the featured assets and read about how they came together, below:
Website Rebuild
Myself, a designer on my team, our Operations director, and an outside developer were the project team tasked with building our new website. We scrapped the old (rabblemill.org) and built thebay.org from scratch.
We met with internal stakeholders to learn about their business needs and explore how the website could facilitate. From there, we created a wireframe, which provided the developer guidance on how to build out the website.
We leveraged in-house design experience to guide the developer on the look and style of the site, which not only helped us maintain branding cohesion, but also cut the overall project expense in half.
How We Talk About Ourselves
Our Programming teams experimented a lot on the way to figuring out what engages youth over the years. While necessary for a young organization, it led to challenges in how we talk about ourselves.
My team conducted a full-scale messaging audit, and developed a warehouse of evergreen printed materials, videos, one-sheets, presentation decks, design templates and copy. So whether you’re posting to social media, presenting to the board, or teaching a kid to ride a skateboard, we’re all speaking with one voice. [view brochure here and watch the video below]