From innovators to fundraisers, c-suite to man-on-the-street, we produce brand experiences in every media for organizations with a mission.

This year alone, our team of storytellers won 6 Tellys and 1 Anthem Award for our videos and design with Catholic Guardian Service.

Minor Nobles Case Study: Catholic Guardian Services

The purpose of this case study is to illustrate the Minor Nobles process. Anthem Award

Background: CGS is an extraordinary $80 million/year not-for-profit family-services organization providing care for New York City’s children, adolescents and families in need - especially in The Bronx and Upper Manhattan. The great majority of the organization is dedicated to providing foster care and related services, which are primarily sustained by government and institutional funding. Additionally, CGS offers four smaller innovative programs which can only operate with the financial support of donors.

Challenge: CGS CEO and Head of Development wanted to help the Board of Directors to more easily active their diverse networks for financial support of these 4 programs. Despite the Board’s obvious dedication to champion all the CGS programs, members lacked a simple mechanism to easily personalize and disseminate the great news, impact, and need of these newer and more innovative programs to potential donors.

Strategy: Our first step was to interview the Board in several small informal groups, to understand the priorities and requirements of their unique professional/social communities to consider financial support. Those invaluable insights informed the organization and user-experience design of our communications, such as introducing eye-opening statistics, an itemized budget, a personal story, a donation dashboard, and a simple way to navigate the information. Another major insight informed the brand architecture. The CGS marquee brand should not dominate the donor-supported programs. Nor were there resources to create and sustain individual brand identities for each of the 4 programs.

Creative Strategy, Direction, and Copywriting

At the same time, we approached NY-based Executive Creative Director and copywriter, Ted Guidotti, to develop the creative strategy and core concept. The audience (prospective donors) should clearly understand their role: Need + Innovation + Donation = An Open Door to Possibility. Ted clarified and elevated the mission in a single line unique to each program.

User Experience

An insight from a CGS board member was the value of a dashboard, so that potential donors could see where they could have the most impact. We first created this dashboard in Google Sheets to accurately position the “needle” of each gauge in proportion to the donations received to-date, recreated the dashboard with the right fonts and colors, then upload per quarter each brochure already on Flipsnack, publishing the update seamlessly to past and current visitors.

GA4 Integration

Finally, in the CGS Property of Google Analytics 4, Minor Nobles created a new data stream for the brochures hosted on FlipSnack to report the efficacy of the brochures at driving traffic to the donation page of CatholicGuardian.org. Minor Nobles is Google Certified in Google Analytics 4.

Visual Design System

Next, we began our process of researching and pitching that strategy to relevant independent experts to improve upon it, develop the design strategy, visual identity, creative direction, copywriting and user-experience.

Minor Nobles approached the NYC-based design collective, Kiss Me I’m Polish, to develop the visual strategy and design the communications template. They used graphical elements of the CGS master brand logo to create the visual identity system for the 4 donor-supported programs, and elevated non-brand colors that CGS was already using elsewhere in the organization.

Distribution Platform

The design system, copy direction and content categories requested during the initial Board interviews, all came together in a unique 10-page deck per program. Minor Nobles recommended and configured Flipsnack, not only for its post-upload functionality features (like Vimeo and Google Sheet embeds), but also, to have a CGS-branded (white-label) URL for each brochure, Google Analytics integration, password protection (the brochures reflected multiple requests from Board members to include financial data), and the ability to update each brochure as needed without having to redistribute the URL to previous recipients.

Minor Nobles Case Study: Syngin

The purpose of this case study is to illustrate the range of Minor Nobles capabilities: B2B to B2C, international enterprise to rural American small business, strategy to execution, corporate web to narrative film, social media advertising to organic community building.

The Challenge: Syngin had no US-based Marketing or Sales staff, so Minor Nobles provided the cultural insights, brand strategy and content necessary for Syngin introduce itself to the US market. Syngin had 2 very different but vital strategic audiences. At the enterprise level, automotive inventory transportation managers and process decision-makers. And at the local small business level, independent owner/drivers of small car-transportation trucking companies. Minor Nobles needed to provide the brand strategy and communications that would introduce Syngin to both.

Production Archive 2007-2018