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It is never good for a company to have just one per cent public awareness, but when the brand in question is a charity the issue is a little more pressing, particularly when it wants to be more campaigning.

‘It is not a good platform to work from,' admits Polly Neate, executive director of public affairs and communications at Action for Children, which rebranded in September from NCH. ‘It was very challenging to get into the media, although we did get coverage. There were always two stages to any introduction. It would start Hi, I'm so and so from the NCH, and then you would have to explain that NCH stood for National Children's Home, and then you would have to talk about what you didn't do. We offer about 500 different services and just a small number of those are residential.'

The lack of brand awareness hampered both the charity's ability to campaign and to raise funds. ‘A brand should offer a direct and appealing conversation to the general public,' says Neate. ‘And ours didn't.'

The charity's values are passion, equality and hope but a comprehensive brand audit among its 15 stakeholder groups three years ago revealed that NCH's identity and image did not convey these. ‘Our brand was not clear,' says Neate. ‘Action for Children is what we are about. It describes what we do.'

Indeed, for many years ‘action for children' was the charity's tagline. This has now been changed to ‘as long as it takes'.

Action for Children helps almost 170,000 children, young people and their families through 450 projects across the UK, and is the leading provider of family and community centres.

‘When we were founded in 1869, we were quite radical. The charity was founded to help children who were quite literally on the street in a way that is not seen today,' adds Neate. ‘It is our 140th anniversary next year, and that was a good reason to start taking stock of our brand. Action for Children is a better vehicle for us.'

The new brand also received a positive reception from the charity's stakeholder groups, which include the Methodist Church. ‘We were founded by a Methodist minister and while we are not directly connected to the church, we do still receive valuable support from it. So it was very important to us that the Methodist Church bought into our new identity.'

It was also important that staff approved. ‘I really believe that, for a successful rebranding, it is vital to take an inside out approach not an outside-in approach,' says Neate. ‘You can't just change an identity and expect everybody to change and adapt to it.'

To retain some links with the past, the new identity, which was developed by London-based Baby Creative, keeps the original red colour and the two characters which were first introduced in 1964, but the logo has been given a looser and fresher feel. The name is written in lower case ‘Meta Action for Children', a special typeface designed by world-renowned typographer Erik Spiekermann.

The rebranding is accompanied by a new website, written in a simple, easy to understand style that an 11 year old child would understand.

An advertising campaign is scheduled for January and Neate is confident that this will help to raise public awareness of Action for Children. ‘We know what we want to achieve and the perception from stakeholders is that the new brand is right,' she says. ‘We have also invested wisely, which is particularly important for a charity.'

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