Turning businesses into beacons
We Are Neutral
Amidst a sea of climate action organizations, We Are Neutral stands out for their passion, tenure and vision. Fearlessly led by their Director, Anna Sampson, We Are Neutral is on a mission to not only help reduce the impacts of climate change, but also to establish the global standard for meaningful carbon offsetting programs, a reduction strategy notoriously loose for the impacts they promise.
We helped We Are Neutral crystallize their positioning in a highly competitive landscape, fine tune their brand’s narrative and evolve their visual language all in an effort to clarify the signal they wanted to share with the world.
Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. We Are Neutral has been on the front lines of this battle for sixteen years and counting. Over time they have become a lot of things to a lot of people and their positioning had become murky. We started there by defining their audience more acutely, purifying the value they bring these audiences and creating a more cohesive and deployable story they could use to engage with.
“Throughout this experience I learned so much, I felt unequivocally heard, and was encouraged to speak my mind. I came out of this with not only a deeper understanding of who we are/aren’t, but with a recipe that we can continue to create from.”
Anna Sampson, President & Director
Most people have heard of the practice of ‘carbon offsetting,’ but most do not understand the enormity of the system this practice fits into. We drilled way down to the simplest delivery method that We Are Neutral approaches their work by.
Climate change is the crisis of our lifetime. Today, more people and businesses are demanding and initiating action. We have 16 years of experience working toward lessening and offsetting carbon emissions – getting our hands dirty (literally planting trees), obsessing over the math (spreadsheets are our sixth sense), immersing ourselves and our clients in reduction and offsetting projects, and keeping on top of policy (invite us to your next dinner party). Carbon reduction/offsetting solutions are expected to grow tenfold over the next decade. A great step forward, that unfortunately brings with it more complexity. Through it all, we believe this problem isn’t too big to solve. And that no act is too small to count.
We are… up for the challenge.
An important element to the overall visual strategy was the role imagery should play. Our approach with portraiture took inspiration from the organization’s name, helping to connect the concept of ‘we’ to the people they hope to reach.
Two more important conventions for imagery were how to showcase the natural world, and the world altered by humans. When it came to natural world the approach focused on presenting systems — an integral part of responsible carbon offsetting programs being focused on the biomes with the greatest return on investment. And when it came to the altered world, by pulling way out on the image it communicates a perspective and view in a more of a macro environment made up of interdependencies.
