Project Overview

Loran Scholars Foundation provides financial support, mentorship, and a community of inspiring former scholars to university-bound students across the country. Selecting just over 100 candidates per year who not only display strong academic skills, but who are more importantly leaders in their community, the Loran program supports scholars through their full post-secondary journey.

Loran hired Intent to develop strategic messaging, redesign their website, refine their logo, and develop several key brand components including a case for support. We reviewed their current website and documents, undertook an extensive stakeholder engagement process, and finding ways to emphasize Loran’s uniqueness to prospective scholars, along with their support systems.

Insights

After engaging scholars, staff, the Loran Board, and working with the Loran team, it was clear that potential, current, and former scholars found that while the program, mentorship, and community were truly life-changing, the brand itself wasn’t recognized much beyond those who already knew about it. We were also told that finding information about how it works, how to apply, and information about the program itself was, at times, difficult.

We also heard that Loran needed to focus on not just the financial aspect of the scholarship, but the community of excellence that the program created—Loran scholars become members of a wider group of similarly-minded individuals who are connected for life, which their brand needed to highlight. We were told that their website was also clunky, and staff had difficulty adding new scholars year after year. As such, in developing a new site, it would be integral to build it in such a way that all aspects were updatable, editable, and manageable by the full Loran team.

Finally, we heard that their logo, a triangle representing their three pillars—character, service, and leadership—was important to the brand and to their scholars, so needed to be maintained in a refresh. It would also be important to help keep some continuity, especially with a full website redesign and new work on their brand and fundraising assets.

Solutions

The Intent team first started by working on a strategy to ensure that the work ahead would be appropriately disseminated to their current and former scholars, but also to a national audience of students, their caregivers, and school administrators. We developed messaging that focused on the community of excellence that the program fosters, and the impact Loran scholars have. We wrote elevator pitches for various audiences, including prospective employers, uniqueness statements, refined the definitions of character, service, and leadership, wrote program descriptions and more. The document served as a guidepost for the copy that would eventually be included in their website, case for support, and other key documents.

The new brand and website were also bolstered by bright, positive images of actual scholars, it was important to show prospective scholars that the existing community was made up of real people.

Intent designed Loran a website that was geared towards potential and new scholars, which highlighted the impact and successes of former scholars. To be more impactful, the site was developed to display stories of scholars geographically close to them by detecting their IP address. We also designed the site to be clear about what the program provides (with a focus more on the mentorship and community than the scholarship itself) so that potential scholars could better understand the full scope of the benefits of the program.

Results

After more than a year of work, Loran launched their website under the new brand design in March 2024. The new site was the perfect vehicle to showcase the revised brand and logo, which was a key component of the Loran brand strategy.

With full brand strategy, brand messaging, and brand guidelines documents, Loran also has a blueprint for internal and external communications that speak the same language, hit the same messages, and remain visually on brand.