Utilising strategic design to redefined Pride's brand identity

Manchester Pride is one of the UK’s leading LGBTQ+ charities, and part of a global Pride movement fighting for LGBTQ+ equality and challenging discrimination.

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Pride first turned to Code looking for strategic support in preparation for its annual comms planning and took advantage of Code’s free-to-access workshops aimed at helping not-for-profit organisations improve their digital service areas. We learned Manchester Pride wanted to evolve its proposition and brand from what was commonly seen as an annual festival for the LGBTQ+ community to a professional organisation that does inspiring and impactful charitable work all year round.

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Pride were impressed with the insights gathered from the initial workshop and asked Code to deliver a redesign of its core pages: Home, Charity, News & Resources, and Events (renamed from Festival).

We began with a full-day design sprint. The main focus was to identify Manchester Pride’s key audiences and needs for each core page and then align these to the business goals. We established specific user profiles for each core audience group, and then built a content model based on these insights.  

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Prior to the session, we’d set Pride homework. The task set was to conduct market research and bring along charity websites they admired. In the workshop, we asked them to introduce the charity websites they’d selected and then did a rose, bud, thorn exercise where they identified elements from each site they liked (rose), disliked (thorn) and wanted to explore (bud).

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The next and final exercise was to story frame our ideal home, event and charity page, drawing upon the insights we’d learnt from the day’s activities. This exercise aims to identify which content we need for each core page.

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We then finalised our preferred content hierarchy and used this as the foundation for the final product of the content design.

So we could help steer the Pride brand away from just being known as a festival, we introduced a more professional branding approach while maintaining the playful brand that has been established over the years and is well-loved by existing users. With a more sophisticated look and clear structure, the new website is set out to appeal more to mature community members and new users.

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We audited the content from Pride’s previous site, identifying gaps in information required to firmly position them as a year-round charity. We also identified areas for new content that placed Manchester at the very heart of the charity and shone a spotlight on the city’s long-standing contribution to the fight for LGBTQ+ liberation.

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During the website design process, these gaps were integrated and laid out. The main goal was to make the site appear less like a festival marketing website and more as a charity hosting year-round events for LGBTQ+ community members of all ages and interests.