College Career & Beyond x Midnight Golf Program
Setting up students for a lifetime of success through the discipline of golf.
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Since 2001, the Midnight Golf Program (MGP) has helped almost 5,000 of the Detroit area’s most promising students achieve their goals in postsecondary education and beyond. As the years passed, the program expanded, so did its waitlist and facility requirements.
As the MGP team prepared to open a new state-of-the-art student center and training facility in downtown Detroit, their leadership team sought a way to align and attract more donors, mentors, and volunteers to their mission.
We worked with the Midnight Golf team to restructure and refresh their brand, to create an entirely new parent organization (College Career & Beyond) that would allow MGP flexibility to grow and welcome in the next generation of donors, volunteers, and students.
Our Services
(87)BrandFusion
Brand Focus
Brand Naming
Verbal Identity
Visual Identity
Brand Strategy
Brand Rollout
(01) Brand Focus
Redefining Midnight Golf around student success.
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When we first connected with Midnight Golf, their team was seeking a straightforward brand refresh. However, after delving into the details of their situation and defining their goals during our two-day Brand Focus workshop, we realized they would need more than just a new look.
Yes, golf is one of the primary teaching tools the program uses to help students develop vital life skills, but golf has never been the end goal of the program. The ultimate goal of Midnight Golf has always been and remains student success. However, one of the issues that surfaced during our discussions was the difficulty in attracting funding and grants beyond the golf world.
The Midnight Golf Program is wildly popular throughout the community, but the name was creating more challenges than opportunities when it came to fundraising. Rather than walking away from the name altogether, we realized there was an opportunity to frame Midnight Golf in a broader student success context by creating a new parent organization with a presentation and name that would better align with education-focused fundraising environments.
Selected Brand Storyboards
(02) Brand Design → Naming
Honoring a legacy while expanding beyond golf.
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Considering Midnight Golf’s popularity, changing the name outright was never an option. We saw an opportunity to retain the name, continue its legacy, and still appeal to a broader fundraising audience by creating a new parent brand under which MGP could thrive. To put it in Detroit terms, if Midnight Golf was Cadillac, we needed to support it with an overarching organization, like General Motors.
We took the team through our comprehensive naming process. We established clear guidelines, goals, themes, and preferences, conducted a competitive audit, and led the team through a collaborative brainstorming session to spark new solutions. Then we dove into ideation.
Ultimately, the name “College Career & Beyond” was selected for the new organization. It had lived as the unofficial tagline of MGP for years, so it was inspired by language that was already familiar to their existing audiences. It also reprioritizes and emphasizes the organization’s impactful educational goals for its new donor audiences.
(02) Brand Design → Voice
A connected verbal identity shaped by Detroit grit.
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Even though we were creating two distinct identities, we knew brands needed to feel connected. The voice and personality were one of the ways we accomplished this. We leaned into aspiration and positivity, but we also focused on a core characteristic that has been emphasized by Midnight Golf (and Detroit) from the beginning — Grit.
This isn’t a program for quitters or an easy ride. Students want to be in MGP. It takes hard work and accountability to complete their curriculum, and even harder work to achieve success in postsecondary education and beyond. We wanted the voice of both brands to convey this attitude and show interested donors, parents, and prospective students that MGP students are all-grit, no-quit superstars of tomorrow.
(02) Brand Design → Visuals
Visual cues that signal a mission with momentum.
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As soon as the decision was made to create two brands, we knew the refreshed Midnight Golf Program (MGP) brand and the new College Career & Beyond (CCB) brand needed to feel distinct, yet related.
With MGP’s new logo, we built in a visual cue — a graduation cap — to allude to its deeper educational mission. With the new CCB crest, we modeled it after a three-dimensional cube to allude to its multidimensional approach to student success. The logos and wordmarks were designed to work in tandem, allowing them to be paired together across various channels. For this reason, both brands also relied on variations of the same color palettes and font choices to drive continuity.
(03) Brand Activation
A clear cadence for students, donors, mentors, and alumni.
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One of the biggest challenges of this project was communicating the relationship between these two brands to multiple audiences. We worked with the client to understand each audience, including students and families, donors and grant programs, as well as mentors and alumni.
Then we created a communications cadence to appeal to each group. Beyond the brand rollout, we also worked directly with the team to integrate the new branding into their state-of-the-art student center and training facility. We consulted on colors, art installations, signage, and more to ensure their new space fit their refreshed branding like a (golf) glove.
