The background: Resonance is focussed on providing ‘shelter and protection to many’

At Resonance, we don’t just aim to serve businesses with excellence. Our founding vision is “to provide shelter and protection to many,” and that means we also offer our skills and services to great causes who are making a difference by giving vulnerable people a helping hand. That’s how we came to work with Woven Whānau.

Woven Whānau partners with parents to create flourishing communities

Woven Whānau is a Whanganui-based initiative, born out of a history of working alongside families. Its mission is to partner with parents to create thriving mums and dads, flourishing families and healthy communities. They’ve learned that partnering mentor parents alongside other parents helps those supported parents to thrive and their families to flourish. Their approach is summed up in this quote from Child Rich Communities NZ: “If families and whānau are well, tamariki are well. If our whānau, families, and tamariki are well, our communities will be too.” Their work is a catalyst for positive inter-generational change in their community.

They serve parents in tough circumstances, like a mum we’ll call “A”. With a gang background and a husband in prison, things looked bleak for her and her three children. With help, she was able to move out of her situation, complete a social work degree, and is now working as a social worker. Or take “F,” a teen mum raising five children on her own. With no secondary qualifications, she was supported as she completed a degree in communications and marketing, and now speaks nationally on motivation.

The challenge: Improve how effectively Woven Whānau represented their work to reach more people

In 2019, Woven Whānau decided they needed to embark on a new journey. Known at that stage as SKIP Whanganui and 303 Parent Initiative, both under the umbrella of Central Baptist Kindergarten (CBK), the leadership team recognised that they needed a new identity and different tools to reach the communities they wanted to help. That’s when Resonance got involved. We started by meeting with the team to understand the initiative and the issues they faced.

How Resonance helped creatively: An inspiring new name and logo

We subsequently facilitated a workshop with the leadership team, where we collectively developed the Woven Whānau name. The name represents their mission to knit families together in a community of support. We then developed a logo inspired by a kete bag, with the weaving strands representing a networked family.

Lynette Archer, Woven Whānau Coordinator, had this to say about the naming and branding exercise:

“One of the most significant things for us has been the way the Resonance team listened to what was important for us to see represented in a name and then the logo and marketing material that accompanied that. The resulting design was so ‘out of the box’ for anything we would have ever thought of! The name finding workshop was fantastic and we reached the place of settling on the name so easily once we had gone through the process with Resonance. The name is aspirational and reflects the combining of our two previous initiatives, it gives us a clear picture to move the new initiative into.

The representation of the awa (river) and the maunga (mountain) within our logo show our place of identity and belonging. The imagery resonates with our community and they have responded very positively to it”.

“One of the most significant things for us has been the way the Resonance team listened to what was important for us to see represented in a name and then the logo and marketing material that accompanied that. The resulting design was so ‘out of the box’ for anything we would have ever thought of!”

Lynette Archer Woven Whānau Coordinator

How Resonance helped creatively:
Storytelling to bring more people on the journey

Our next step was to work with the team to improve their storytelling, which is vital for engaging people who could benefit from their services and for inspiring potential funders. This work has helped to establish, “a professional image that creates an easy point of connection for parents and community organisations to identify with and want to be a part of with us,” says Lynette. We did this by developing new tools that bring to light the plight of isolated New Zealand parents and explain Woven Whānau’s proven solution, including a new website, marketing collateral, and PowerPoint presentation.

We emphasised the numerous case studies that the team at 303 Parent Initiative had built up over the years, illustrating their effectiveness in helping transform parents from situations of depression, self-harm and despair, to being able to live flourishing lives. For example, some of these parents are now working themselves as social workers, nurses, midwives, teachers, business people and motivational speakers.

We also provided strategic fundraising advice and tools to help engage donors, which “was very well received” and led to Woven Whānau “receiving a significant amount of funding from a local funder.” (If you would like to support the work that Woven Whānau does, please click here.)

The result: Empowering Woven Whānau and the community they serve

The overall result of our work with Woven Whanau has been to help an inspirational organisation do even more good in their corner of the world. Lynette sums it up by saying:

“We really want to acknowledge how much it has meant for us to have you (Resonance) support us in this way. There is no way that we would have been ready or prepared to go into our community without it, it has been a gift to us and to the parent community of Whanganui.”

The work we did also set up Woven Whānau to go further, with Kerralie Adam, Woven Whānau facilitator, saying: “We are extremely grateful for the imagery and illustration content that was provided as part of our marketing and branding package. It has given us huge capacity to produce further promotional material appropriate to our needs. We have loved having the flexibility of using the imagery to create presentations, flyers and brochures with a cohesive, professional look”.

“We really want to acknowledge how much it has meant for us to have you (Resonance) support us in this way. There is no way that we would have been ready or prepared to go into our community without it, it has been a gift to us and to the parent community of Whanganui.”

Lynette Archer Woven Whānau Coordinator