Philadelphia Global Identity Partnership (PGIP)
The Philadelphia Global Identity Partnership (PGIP) represents a consortium of over 100 nonprofits, city agencies, businesses, and civic organizations in the Greater Philadelphia region. Their goal is to create a unified brand and identity for the City that stakeholders can use in their own efforts to market this growing metropolitan area, attracting investors, talent, businesses, and residents. To help promote this brand, they tasked Message Agency with developing an online brand toolkit, PHLStory.org, that provides messaging and resources for network partners.
The Challenge
A brand is only as effective as its adoption, and this brand seeks to engage a wide range of diverse stakeholders who are invested in Philadelphia’s growth and future. The real challenge of this project was not in creating an online brand toolkit itself, but determining how to tell Philadelphia’s story in a way that enables all stakeholders to use it effectively on their own. The guiding principle was that the city can only move toward its full global potential if as many people as possible are telling a consistent story about who Philadelphia is, what it offers, and why it makes sense to invest there. The toolkit needed to be easy to understand, provide the tools and data stakeholders were looking for, and clearly communicate the purpose of this initiative.
Our Approach
The site would serve not only as a resource but also as an organizing tool to recruit project partners, allowing them to add their resources and perspectives to this living brand. To accommodate the needs of a start-up brand, we developed a three-staged rollout that shifted audience emphasis over time, as the project evolved. 
The initial launch would focus on the core audience—current partners and their immediate networks—to help recruit additional participants and provide initial content to populate the site. The second phase would focus on a proximal audience: the community and economic development organizations, civic leaders, businesses, funders, and others seeking to make an argument for investment in Philadelphia. In its third phase, the site would be reorganized to address the distal audience as a priority, one that speaks directly to the intended recipients of the City’s brand and data, primarily the businesses, potential employees, and other stakeholders who are evaluating the Philadelphia region as a place to relocate, build, or invest.
A Flexible Site for an Evolving Project
A key aspect of the website was the need to allow the site to easily transform and shift emphasis as the project engaged different audiences over time. To accommodate this need, we designed a series of flexible landing pages that easily allow site administrators to present brand assets and highlight resources and stories on demand. The components we designed provided the greatest range of layouts and uses available to admininstrators, while also keeping the site dynamic and sophisticated in terms of its design.