CASE STUDY
Equality California
Helping a civil rights organization evolve
Challenge
By 2016, Equality California organization stood at a strategic inflection point. The fight for marriage equality had been won. Major civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people had been secured at the state level. Despite this, the political environment was shifting rapidly. Rising threats to LGBTQ rights nationally and ongoing disparities in health and well-being within California’s LGBTQ+ communities left an open question: how should a state-focused organization respond to this nationwide shift?
How could Equality California reframe its mission and brand for the next chapter? Three foundational questions framed the work. What should the organization’s mission be in a post-marriage-equality world? How should it balance its local focus in California with ambition at the national level? And how should the organization serve an increasingly intersectional LGBTQ+ community while maintaining the same intimate support of its core stakeholders?
Solutions
Prophet partnered with Equality California to refresh the organization’s brand strategy and identity. The work was grounded in a rigorous research process, using multiple methods to surface clear answers to the key questions facing the organization.
The research included in-depth stakeholder interviews with Equality California staff, board members, partner organizations, institutional funders, and political allies. Through these interviews, Prophet captured the full range of perspectives on where the organization could credibly stretch. In addition, a series of digital focus groups with 28 supporters explored how the LGBTQ+ community and donors perceived the organization, surfacing what they valued and what they needed it to become. And lastly, an online quantitative survey of 652 respondents, benchmarked against six peer LGBTQ organizations, gave a clear picture of where Equality California’s brand was strong, where there was room to grow, and how it stacked up against the broader field.
The research surfaced clear tensions Equality California’s leadership needed to resolve alongside clear opportunities to lean into. Supporters strongly recognized the organization’s legislative impact but wanted to see more visibility around its work at the community level. Donors wanted California to remain the primary focus, but supported the organization becoming a meaningful voice at the federal level. Increased intersectionality energized supporters who understood it, but Equality California needed to make its work centered around intersectional communities more visible and accessible.
From this foundation, Prophet developed a refreshed brand strategy and a five-year plan to bring it to life. The strategy gave Equality California a clear path forward: an anchoring in its legislative legacy, an evolution to draw clearer connections between policy work and community impact, and a repositioning to engage with intersectional communities more authentically and intentionally.
The brand strategy laid groundwork for a full transformation, including a refreshed mission statement, a new tagline & messaging architecture, and a modernized visual identity designed to feel human, accessible, and intuitive across the digital platforms where the next generation of supporters and donors live. The new identity needed to signal the bold evolution Equality California was undertaking, honor the Californian heritage and policy successes the organization was built on, and adapt to every digital and physical context the organization shows up in.
Results
Equality California’s refreshed strategy, brand identity, and brand assets launched to strong community response. The new positioning equipped the organization to show up differently in a moment when LGBTQ rights face mounting pressure nationwide, establishing the organization as more inclusive, visibly community-led, and better prepared for an bigger fight.
In the months following the launch, the organization saw meaningful engagement gains: a 40% increase in monthly X impressions and more than 27,000 new members signing up to the organization’s work. More importantly, the refreshed brand set Equality California on a path to become an even more inclusive, disruptive, and enduring agent of change for the LGBTQ+ community for years ahead.
Impact
40%
increase in monthly Twitter impressions
27k
new members since the rebrand