Case Study: Providing an end-to-end production solution

Meet the Client

CultureLink is a settlement and community organization that has been meeting the needs of diverse communities for the last 30 years. Located in Toronto’s west end, the organization delivers a wide range of settlement and community programs for over 12,000 children, adults, and seniors every year.

The Client’s Challenge

In 2019, CultureLink approached us to write their annual report. After years of producing a labour-intensive, all-encompassing 40-page book on their own, they wanted to try a different approach, starting with a writing style that better reflected the impact they have on their community. We proposed a slimmed-down 16-page book featuring six, short but impactful, testimonial articles, one to represent each of the key messages in their strategic plan. Every article would tell the story of a CultureLink participant, and showcase the benefits, growth, and success they achieved with the organization’s support. The stories created context to help donors better understand the organization’s mission and the real challenges their donations helped solve.

The six stories we crafted, along with the Executive Director’s letter (written after conducting a phone interview with him to gather his thoughts and ideas), was then designed in-house. 

Feedback on the slimmed down annual report was overwhelmingly positive—the real-life stories clearly showed the impact the organization made in people’s lives and truly explained the organization’s accomplishments through their activities of the past year. Donors now clearly knew the difference they made.

In 2020, CultureLink once again approached us to write their annual report, but this time they wanted an end-to-end solution from conception, to writing, to design and production, to printing and delivery.  

Our Solution

We started by working with CultureLink to develop a theme for the annual report—one that would inform donors while inspiring them to continue supporting the organization. We brainstormed ideas and once again reflected on the six key messages before landing on the concept of how CultureLink is making connections for newcomers to Canada.

With a theme in place, we set about telling stories that showcased just a handful of the connections CultureLink’s many programs and services helped newcomers make over the past fiscal year. 

Once the stories were complete, we brought in a designer to powerfully communicate the theme through visuals, incorporating circles to emphasize connections. The circles (or dots) appeared randomly throughout the report and all photos and graphic elements fell into this circular format. 

In order to ease the project management burden on the client, the Luminate team managed the entire production, review and proofreading process on CultureLink’s behalf. Lastly, upon final signoff, we arranged for the printer and ensured their annual report was delivered to their office well before their annual general meeting.

Testimonial

“Having a third party in charge of producing the annual report on our behalf was timesaving to say the least. While collecting the stories and going back and forth with edits meant some coordination on our side, a great deal of the workload was shared and even taken over by Luminate. It is important in partnerships to find a counterpart that utterly understands your vision and values. This is true of Deborah and her team. Their desire to support and meet our needs showed in every step of the way and the results speak for themselves.”

- Ximena Marky
Administrative Assistant, CultureLink