Reimagining a Community Development Pioneer

In order to refresh the Community Loan Fund brand, we spent time with their team to understand the organization’s history, how to honor that, and how they want to present themselves today. That included creating a brand experience that is distinct and memorable.

Our goal for first-time visitors was to convey the welcoming, friendly, and professional culture of the organization. In addition, we wanted visitors to very quickly gain a broad understanding of what the organization does and find a pathway to the services they seek.

Community Loan Fund was a pioneer in the space when they made their first loan. Since then, CDFIs have spread across the US. And most of them look alike. We set out to create a distinct New Hampshire Community Loan Fund brand in terms of their visuals, messaging, and leadership role across the country.

We put a lot into the mix to create Community Loan Fund’s new visual identity — a sophisticated color palette that’s future focused, timeless, and earthy with a nod to the agricultural roots of the area — an important audience. 

The trick was to develop an identity using vibrant colors that conveyed energy and positivity while also feeling trustworthy and grounded.

The design system for the brand expression started with an updated logo and expanded from there. One concern was their very long name. In short, we created a word hierarchy. ‘New Hampshire’ is de-emphasised because their work now extends farther. ‘Community’ is emphasised to reflect their impact model. ‘Loan Fund’ is large to communicate their primary activity. Investors and borrowers refer to them as Community Loan Fund, so we made that the quick read of the wordmark.

The wordmark font is also the primary font used across the site, bringing cohesion to the brand system.

The icon hints at some of their activities and uses single weight lines to emphasisz the equal importance of every aspect of their work.

The four distinct icons in the crest represent housing, food and environment, farming, and sunrays. Together they encapsulate one of the core philosophies of the organization — Opportunity For All. These icons are used throughout the site as patterns to tie the site experience together.

Another element used across the site are image collages that harken back to the collection of icons in the crest — a subtle way of connecting photos and graphic elements.

With everything about the Community Loan Fund brand and website having been completely rethought, a guide was necessary to ensure that current and future team members created materials and communications that were universally on brand. 

Among the details we provided were: How to produce images with rounded colors, the use of background colors for photos, rules for using the watermark, and how to keep text legible on top of colors for accessibility purposes.

A mini-system within the larger brand system, the icons and illustrations used on the site communicate consistently across different pages. The illustrations retain the single line weight of the logo illustrations, but are more complex and colorful to communicate more detailed ideas.

Even the statistics on the site are included in the brand ecosystem, using similar lineweights to the icons in the primary logo.

A rebrand isn’t complete without print collateral and related digital materials. Putting these final items together truly integrated all of the visual brand elements throughout the organization.

Community Loan Fund’s neighbors-investing-in-neighbors impact model requires a little explaining to fully understand. When creating their brand narrative, we combined copywriting, design, and interactions on the About page to communicate the idea. We often find that this approach works better than using a lot of copy.

What’s the voice and tone of a traditional financial institute? Whatever you have in mind, that’s not what New Hampshire Community Loan Fund wanted their messaging to sound or feel like. Their borrowers are their neighbors and they celebrate their successes. That’s why many pages on the site begin with setting expectations about what working with their team will feel like.

When visiting many of the pages of the site, visitors are ready to get down to brass taxes. They’re serious about exploring a loan or taking an action. The messaging at the top of these pages reflects that, letting them know right away that this is a page that can start them on their journey to becoming economically secure.

When visiting many of the pages of the site, visitors are ready to get down to brass taxes. They’re serious about exploring a loan or taking an action. The messaging at the top of these pages reflects that, letting them know right away that this is a page that can start them on their journey to becoming economically secure.

We’re not loan professionals, and neither are many of the impact investors who visit the Community Loan Fund site. So we sat down with their team and worked out how to get the idea of community investment across as simply as possible.

As with their impact model, we used a combination of visuals and copy to get potential investors to understand the big picture quickly and easily. We used plain language knowing that the details will be presented when an investor is serious about committing resources.

To align all of their messaging, we reworked Community Loan Fund’s Mission and Vision statements. The results reflect the idea that a Mission Statement should focus on near-term activities and objectives while the Vision statement should express the desired future state they are working towards.

As an organization operating for over 40 years, it can be tricky to communicate the Community Loan Fund’s impact. One of our solutions is an interactive map that lets visitors explore their impact across the state within 9 service categories. 

This is a prime example of show, don’t tell storytelling that requires a custom website feature be designed and built.

Different site visitors have very different needs. This variety of needs required an approach to developing the resource library that allowed visitors to quickly filter the extensive content to find relevant information. Building the site custom using Craft CMS allowed us to create an easy to use tagging system that will serve them well for many years to come.

At times, certain audiences and the service Community Loan Funds offer seem very similar. For example, Manufactured-home Buyers, Manufactured-home Owners, and ROC Residents (Manufactured-home communities) have significant overlap.

We devised an information flow that provided just enough description for people to self-identify and start down the information path created specifically for them.

Engaging with a financial institution can be intimidating. We wanted the content to feel approachable and scannable. Rather than blocks of texts, we provided high-level information that helps potential borrowers understand what’s on offer and provide pathways to dig deeper.

The idea of dual benefits is important to attracting impact investors. One of our goals in the branded copywriting was to get this idea across and appeal to both the head and the heart.

Rolling out a rebrand, updated visual identity, and new website is an opportunity to reach out to everyone on an organization’s contact list — and beyond. We led the process by turning what could have been a simple rollout announcement into a 3-month long awareness campaign that rolled into end-of-year fundraising.

To round out the awareness campaign and provide the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund communications team with everything they need, we created a set of social media assets that they can build on going forward.

In parallel with the initial rebrand and website design and development, our teams collaborated on the 2024 Annual Report. This brought the brand expression alive and demonstrated how easy it is to use throughout the organization. Months later, we worked together to produce the 2025 Annual Report as well.