A New Brand Platform for Diversity Richmond

Though not listed as one of our core values, CapTech’s commitment to giving back to our local communities has been part of unspoken mission since our founding 26 years ago. Whether it’s partnering to support arts, innovation, technical training programs, local sports teams, or non-profits, CapTech and its employees donate time, talent, and resources to support organizations that enrich the communities in which we live and work. These partnerships often present opportunities to express our stated core values as well. Such is the case with our recent work for Diversity Richmond and our core value of Belonging.

The roots of Diversity Richmond in Central Virginia as we know it today go back decades, with the founding of the Gay Community Center of Richmond in 1999 and the birth of Virginia Pride in 2006. Through the years of dedication to and advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community in Central Virginia, both organizations underwent significant growth and change, including the rebranding of GCCR as Diversity Richmond in 2015. In 2021, recognizing their shared mission, Virginia Pride and Diversity Richmond joined forces, becoming stronger together.

Despite this merger, Diversity Richmond had yet to reimagine its online or public presence as a truly unified entity. In early 2023, the team at Diversity Richmond asked us to integrate their disparate websites to better represent them as a single organization and strengthen their impact with Greater Richmond’s LGBTQ+ community.

We jumped at the chance but quickly realized two things: First, the existing websites for the four disparate entities—which also included Diversity Thrift and Iridian Gallery—had little visual consistency as well as issues with usability and mobile friendliness. Second, and more challenging, was that a consolidated website could only be as strong as the overall brand identity, and Diversity Richmond’s brand system suffered the same inconsistency and lack of cohesion as its websites.

Diversity Richmond agreed with our assessment and asked us to guide them through a re-brand that would strengthen their organizational unity and be a rallying point for their efforts in the LGBTQ+ community, while at the same time allowing each entity to shine. In addition to the overarching branding system, each entity would still need its own mark, reflecting their unique mission and individuality.

Our approach to the website redesign and rebrand for this pro bono engagement mirrored that of our billable clients, including undertaking an initial assessment phase to ensure we understood their needs, the perspectives of various stakeholder groups, as well as the larger market context in which this new website and brand would compete for attention. Competitive research, brand workshops, customer surveys, and stakeholder interviews led the CapTech team to understand that while each organization operated differently, they all shared an unwavering commitment, “Diversity. Period.” This commitment, rendered in logo form as a large uppercase “D,” punctuated—literally—with an affirmative “period,” is now the core of the new visual identity system. From there, the team designed a family of distinctive “D.” logos – one for each of the four entities.

As this new brand platform emerged, work on the website redesign continued—platform selection and configuration, information architecture and navigation clarification, content optimization and migration, and page building and coding all happened during lunches, nights, and weekends, fueled by our team’s enthusiasm and dedication to delivery excellence. Work accelerated as we approached September, with the annual Pride Fest celebration, which would serve as the launch for the revitalized website and reimagined brand. To celebrate the new look and generate excitement with board members and the wider community, we created the launch video seen below. Finally, to ensure ongoing consistency, we created brand guidelines for how to apply “Diversity. Period.” in all its variations.

Like most of our client relationships, our work on this project is only the latest effort in a much longer relationship that began a few years prior. After the successful launch in 2020 of our first Employee Resource Group—Black Excellence at CapTech—the seeds for our next ERG were planted with a panel discussion in celebration of Pride Month in 2021. Virginia Pride Program Director James Millner not only served on the panel, but also helped advise us in the creation of our next ERG, Pride at CapTech, dedicated to CapTech members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community. We were only too happy to not only return the favor this past year, but to give action to our commitment to creating communities of Belonging, both here at CapTech and in our hometowns as well.