Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation
Industry
Cause and Nonprofit
Our work
Brand strategy, story, and positioning
Naming and identity design
Brand book and launch strategy
Animations
Event collateral
Website development
Digital marketing ads and templates
Copywriting
Story collection design
1,500
Exhibit submissions
140+
Stories across TV, radio, online
From concept to market ready national campaign
Toward the end of the COVID lockdown, CCLF wanted to develop a national platform to empower Canadian kids to share their pandemic experiences through storytelling workshops and a digital exhibition – all as a path toward greater literacy skills for children in every part of the country.
This new national brand invited children and their families from every province and territory in the country to share their pandemic experiences through creative mediums such as drawing, writing, poetry, and videos.
In parallel, our team worked collaboratively with CCLF and its 40 partner organizations to develop tools for local, on-site engagement. We also developed a campaign resources and recruitment website with custom story collection and scalable file management process.
The Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation (CCLF) has a big mission – to ensure all children in Canada are equipped with the literacy skills they need to reach their full potential. When they say literacy skills, they mean it in the broadest sense. And that’s why they enlisted Pilot to lead a series of design sprints to take a new national initiative from concept to market ready.
Brand Discovery
The Pilot team began by setting up a series of listening sessions – the backbone of all of our Discovery work. We engaged with curriculum developers, program delivery teams, sector partners, and CCLF leadership to understand the opportunities and challenges present in building a new national storytelling platform in service of literacy.
Next our team turned its attention to unearthing insights into the pandemic experiences of children as reported by global educational organizations, international media, and select academics offering early insights. We learned that while the pandemic took away many rituals and comforts in childrens’ lives, these were replaced over time by new ones. We encountered stories that were both traumatic and restorative – disruptive and adaptive. Our design explorations led us to a new brand rooted in the lost and the found of lockdown life.
Lost & Found
This new national brand invited children and their families from every province and territory in the country to share their pandemic experiences through creative mediums such as drawing, writing, poetry, and videos. In parallel, our team worked collaboratively with CCLF and its 40 partner organizations to develop tools for local, on-site engagement. We also developed a campaign resources and recruitment website with custom story collection and scalable file management process.
Rapid Results
Within 10 weeks of the brand launch, Lost & Found reached more than 5,000 children, caregivers, and families from every province and territory. Forty partner organizations delivered storytelling workshops, generating more than 1,500 submissions to the Lost & Found digital exhibit.
Word of the project spread across the country and Lost & Found appeared in 140+ radio, television, newspaper and online news stories. Many featured child ambassadors – children who took part in the workshops and shared their stories so that the public could learn first hand about their experiences during the pandemic.
Making History
Lost & Found – Pandemic Stories of Discovery by Kids in Canada will remain online as a digital exhibition until 2025, when it will be archived to preserve these poignant stories as part of Canadian history.
I want to thank each of you for playing a key role in the creation, development and delivery of the Lost & Found project. Your expertise, creativity, insights, and talent were a big part of what made this project such a success.
Ariel Siller, CEO, Canadian Children’s Literacy Foundation
