Best Community Event Logos
Over the course of a day, you subconsciously look at hundreds of event logos. From businesses you drive by on your commute, to the logo printed on your morning coffee, to the icon on your computer, you probably see some logos so often that you don’t even notice them anymore. At some point, you might even find yourself designing a logo for an event in your community.
In this article, we’re highlighting community event logos that caught our eye and forced us to look just a little bit longer than the rest. From the Great American Beer Fest in Colorado, to Food Truck Friday in Matthews, North Carolina, we’re going on a virtual road trip to see some of our favorite community event logos to date.
Riverbend Festival – Chattanooga, TN
Attracting 350,000+ attendees over eight days, the Riverbend Festival features dozens of musical artists playing on the shores of the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. Despite high-profile contemporary artists such as Flo Rida, Macklemore, and Weezer gracing the main stages, the logo features a retro music festival feel. From the rounded typography to the starry iconography, the logo alludes to the origin of mainstream music festivals in the 60s and 70s, an atmosphere of togetherness and camaraderie that can still be felt today.
Matthews Food Truck Fridays – Matthews, NC
In 2018, Haven Creative redesigned a handful of event logos for the Town of Matthews’ most well-attended events. Among them was Matthews’ Food Truck Fridays, a summer event series in the town that attracts more than 20,000 visitors every year from around the Greater Charlotte area. The logo redesign highlights the town’s new color story from Haven Creative’s rebrand, along with the iconic red brick texture that can be found all throughout the town.
Great American Beer Festival – Denver, CO
Craft beer is a booming industry across the U.S. It has also been a way for communities to gather and bond over a shared appreciation for the craft. Every September, Denver, Colorado hosts 60,000 attendees for the Great American Beer Festival. The logo has three golden stripes, a possible nod to the Colorado state flag, and an all-American star to top it off. As a whole, the logo resembles a pint glass bubbling over with cold brew. The logo is charming enough as a still image, but you need to check out the CSS animation on the event’s website of bubbles rising from the top of the logo.
That concludes our tour of cool community event logos for now! Haven Creative is focused on creating beautifully event branding logos for communities across the U.S, and we love the inspiration wherever we can find it. To learn more about our marketing services, click here.
How to Create a Successful Community Brand
If you want to create a brand for your community, but you don’t know where to begin, you’re in the right place! At Haven Creative, our primary expertise is in developing community brand platforms as brand marketing agency.
Let’s start by defining what a brand is and is not. A brand is more than a logo or a tagline. It’s often said that a brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. Whether you realize it or not, your community already has a “brand.” Brands are based on the perceptions that reside in the hearts and minds of your community members, businesses and visitors. Through community engagement, strategic messaging and compelling visuals, these perceptions can be positively influenced. This work is often referred to as a “brand platform” - a living document that establishes a foundation for the organization’s identity, messaging and visual presentation.
Rally the Troops
But before you even consider kicking off a brand platform project, you’ll need to rally the troops. That means, gather up all of the internal key stakeholders that will have a say in the branding approval process and ensure that everyone is on the same page with creating a cohesive look for the community.
If you found this blog, you likely already understand the importance of creating a community brand. But if your peers aren’t quite convinced that branding is right for your community, check out this blog about why community branding is important.
During the initial stakeholder meeting, you’ll need to define the goals for the rebrand project as well as potential outcomes that you would make the project a success.
If you aren’t sure how to measure branding – check out our blog about how to measure a community's brand awareness.
Create Request for Proposal
Once you have the goals and potential outcomes defined, draft a request for proposals (RFP). Although they are often seen as a necessary evil for marketing agencies, RFPs are a great way to help ensure your company procures the most competitively priced services you need to complete your project.
Communicate and listen
The key to successfully launching a community brand is to communicate early and often throughout the brand process. Make sure that whoever you choose to lead the brand project conducts community engagement sessions, surveys and be sure to listen to what these groups are telling you about the community brand. Branding can only be successful if the messaging aligns with the community offering. And the core of the messaging has to come from the people. It has to be authentic and relevant to them.
Still have questions about how to successfully create a community brand? Phone a Maven! We’re here to share our knowledge with our peers and partners to create better communities around the globe. Contact us today!
How is Social Media Affecting our Lives for the Better?
Social media is much more than a trend. It has become an essential part of the fabric of modern society. This is true on many levels, such as the way we socialize, the way we gain access to information and the way businesses connect with their communities. We often hear about the negative effects of social media, but how do these channels impact our lives for the better?
Social Media Opens Communication Between Local Government and Communities
Within our communities, social media enables us to connect in a very convenient way and allows room for an impactful social media strategy for businesses and communities. The ease of 2-way communication between local government leaders and the public has never been more convenient. Community members have the ability to attend local government public meetings and events via live stream, when unable to attend in person. Social media enables local government to spread weather and emergency news quickly and effectively. Community members are able to communicate and connect with local government representatives, ultimately building trust.
Social Media Supports Local Economy
New Urbanism and main street revitalizations are on the rise throughout the United States. People are flocking to areas that offer walkability with housing and shopping in close proximity, along with accessible public spaces. With that, comes the need for the support and growth of small businesses. Through social media, small business owners are able to advertise directly to their local community much more economically than traditional advertising methods. Here, they are able to promote their products and services and interact directly with their customers. When small businesses are thriving, so are local economies.
Social Media Helps Build a Sense of Community
Human beings, no matter their age or demographic, have an innate desire to belong and be a part of something. Now, more than ever before, people have an urgent need to connect socially online and to have easy access to many social features. Through apps such as “Meetup” community members are able to connect socially based on common interests. Singles can date and meet other singles through a multitude of dating apps. Parents are even able to locate and vet babysitters in order to procure a night out on the town. The possibilities are endless.
Social Media Enables a Community to Give Back
Yes, social media can be used to inspire people to get involved in community life. Community focused events, such as litter sweeps and coat/food drives can be planned and advertised through social media extending their reach. Through online fundraisers, communities are able to support various causes as well as directly support a community member in need. Social media can even be used for various noble causes such as social welfare activities and promotion of Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). Not only this, but it also helps to change the way people live. It creates awareness and helps people discover various innovations that help them enhance their own lives. Every individual, from a farmer to a teacher can benefit from the awareness factor of social media.
Community leaders love the idea of the two-way communication social media is capable of offering. However, they don’t always have the time or the know-how to create these accounts and social media strategies. At HAVEN Creative®, we are an official Hubspot Partner, which helps us manage social media accounts across multiple platforms for our clients. Give us a call if you would like more information!
Easy Content Pieces to Improve Communication in Your Community
You’re posting consistent news on social media, tracking metrics and engaging with residents online, and yet you still hear the same feedback: “We’re not communicating enough!” It can be frustrating when you’re already pressed for time and are being asked to put even more content out to your community. We feel you, and we’re here to help with your local government communications! Below are some quick and easy content pieces you can put together to change up your communications strategy and improve community communication while keeping time spent to a minimum.
Monthly One-page Newsletter
It can be daunting and time-consuming to put together a 4+ page newsletter every single month, but even one digital page can do the trick! Include a list of dates, times, and locations for upcoming community events, construction and traffic notices, dates and times of Board or Council meetings, and perhaps a short feel-good story about a resident or staff member in the community. Voilà, you have a shareable piece of content that contains tons of information at a glance.
Monthly Social Media Recaps
If you’re closely monitoring the comments on your social media pages, you’re likely seeing a pattern of consistently asked questions on a monthly basis. While it’s best practice to respond to comments directly to be sure people see them, you can also create one dedicated post each month that answers the most frequently asked questions on social media. Usually, if one person has a question, lots of people have the same one, so this can help clarify certain topics or needs for the entire community at one time, saving you time in the long run.
FAQs from Department Heads
Speaking of frequently asked questions, odds are your community’s staff is also receiving a slew of questions they’re having a hard time responding to consistently. Every month, reach out to a different department head and ask them what questions the community has about their projects or services. Compile them into a post, and have the department head or a staff member on their team write the answers. This does two things. First, it puts some of the content creation in the hands of department heads, saving you some time. Second, it introduces staff members to the community, which helps to build trust. As a bonus, you could add a photo of the staff member to the post to help put their name to a face. Photos of people also tend to receive high engagement across all platforms.
Fast Facts
Fast Facts are one of our favorite types of content to create at HAVEN Creative®. Simply grab 3-4 numerical statistics for the month surrounding a theme. For example, if our theme is “Parks and Recreation,” our stats might be the number of staff members in the department, the number of parks and fields in the community, the total staff hours it takes to pull off a major community event, or total number of attendees for our biggest event. This helps to communicate the overall impact of certain departments or projects in the community, and it takes less than 30 minutes to put together! Easy peasy!
We hope some of these short content pieces will help get you started with switching up your local government communications strategy when you’re pressed for time. However, if you have your heart set on that 4+ page newsletter, we can certainly help you out! HAVEN Creative® produces monthly digital newsletters for communities that save staff time and improve community communication while building trust. If you’d like to receive more information about this service, please contact us here!
Three Easy Apps for Image Editing
Welcome to the world of digital marketing! In order to stay relevant, not only do you create visual posts for multiple social media platforms, you also curate blog content, and the best part - everything you put out into the world must be quality, consistent, and original.
While this may seem daunting, there are multiple user-friendly apps and shortcuts to create beautiful visual content, which is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than any other type. There’s no denying the fact that having team members who have mastered the skills of elite image editing software programs will benefit your organization. However, in today’s fast paced world where quality of content no longer trumps quantity, spending 20-30 minutes editing a photo or graphic is not always the best and most economical use of your resources.
The masterminds who create applications heard your cries and created some user-friendly image editing apps to make your life easier. Here are just three of the many we are loving at the Haven.
PicMonkey is an online photo editor, compatible with iOS and Android. It is best for graphic design and is free with in-app purchases.
One of our favorite features is its share-ability on multiple platforms. Edited images can be uploaded directly to Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Facebook and can also be saved to your computer.
Other features include customization of collage design with simple drag and drop options. Users can make easy adjustments to spacing between images, add rounded corners, and can set branded colors or adjust transparency of backgrounds.
There are more than 20 free layouts to choose from, and it supports cloud storage service. Our only con is that images cannot be added to the background.
LiveLuvCreate is an easy to use platform for image creation where the user can access a wide range of layouts for creating interactive designs.
Users can work on three text editing areas: font types, styles, and colors can be selected with ease.
This app is loaded with a variety of design layouts. The user can create a collage of several graphics which can be selected from the tool library or uploaded from a computer. In order to do additional image enhancements, you can choose special photo effects, filters and borders. As soon as your design is complete, this interactive editing platform allows easy sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, and other platforms. You can also save designs to your computer.
Canva is one of our most used and favorite apps. There is both a free and paid ($12.95/month) version of the app. The free version allows users to create posters, presentations, business invitations, and cards.
You can design social media cover images, IG and story posts, and blog photos. It can directly pull your images from your Facebook account and users can upload their graphics from a computer.
Users can access the wide collection of templates and photos from Canva’s software library. Unlimited storage for media is available to paid members whereas free members have access to 1GB of storage space. There are lots of stock images in the Canva library that can be accessed for $1 if you aren’t interested in investing in a monthly subscription.
This software also allows users to collaborate with teams with its easy image sharing abilities.
All three of these image editing apps are user friendly and fun to play with but even with easy-to-use tools right at our fingertips, time is a limited resource. If you need help designing materials for your community, call a Maven today!
Top 4 Funniest Slogans for Small Towns
Taglines or slogans are an important part of any community’s identity. It’s the easiest way for a resident or visitor to remember the town, especially if it’s quirky. As a marketing agency, we wanted to share with you the funniest slogans in the country.
Gravity, Iowa
Who says science can’t be fun? The welcome sign to Gravity, Iowa, proudly touts, "We're down to earth. If Gravity goes, we all go."If your community has a name that invites a play on words, incorporating that into a tagline can be memorable.
McKinleyville, California
"Where horses have the right of way" is no longer be the motto of McKinleyville, California, but the town’s equine residents still have it made. Locals can ride their horses along sandy stretches of beaches in the area.
Santa Claus, GA
One of the funniest ones may be Santa Claus, GA where their tagline is "the city that loves children.” Although this is not the tagline that we would have chosen, it definitely stands out. Santa Claus, how about this instead, “feels like ho-ho-home.”
Happy, TX
For Happy town, it is “The Town Without a Frown.” We love a good rhyme at HAVEN Creative®. They used a common usage for the word happy and included it in their timeline. Thus, the timeline is more memorable!
Does your community have a tagline that properly encompasses your town? HAVEN Creative® is a marketing agency, located in North Carolina, focused on creating beautifully branded town and event logos for communities across the U.S, and we love the inspiration wherever we can find it. Click here to learn more about our marketing services.
Also, thank you to The Why Not 100's blog, 77 Terrific Town Slogans, for helping us gather information about the funniest slogans in small towns.
Town of Waxhaw Event Logos | Before & After
In 2015, the Town of Waxhaw hired Haven Creative to rebrand the town with a new color story, brand story, brand pillars, and logo designs. This included redesigning the town seal and major event logos to reflect the new brand standards. Below are the logos before and after the rebrand, and they prove how impactful updated brand standards can be on the overall look and feel of a community!
Town Seal
The redesigned Town Seal incorporates the Waxhaw logo, the iconic walkover bridge and train, the feather (used in the Parks and Recreation logo and the brand colors. These elements serve to represent and reinforce the brand themes of heritage, activities, well-being as well as the Town values Accountability, Innovation, Integrity, Professionalism, Respect, Stewardship, Teamwork. The sketched icons were submitted by local artists and serve to represent the art culture in Waxhaw.
Jammin’ By the Tracks
Jammin’ By the Tracks is Waxhaw’s summer concert series that runs from May through September every year. The new logo incorporates guitar iconography from the original logo while adding the new branded color story and fonts to achieve the rustic refined aesthetic.
Grill’n & Chill’n BBQ Cook-Off
The annual Kansas City-style BBQ Cook-Off takes place Saturday afternoon during the Autumn Treasures festival. The competition was symbolized by the cooking pig in previous years, and a fun take on the pig came through in the new logo design. The new logo was made to compliment the Autumn Treasures in promotional materials.
Kaleidoscope Festival
Held in the Springtime, Waxhaw’s annual Kaleidoscope Festival is a celebration of art and culture in the heart of downtown Waxhaw. This logo is unique because it was updated in 2019 to reflect a new direction for the festival, incorporating culinary, musical, and fine art symbolism, while still adhering to the brand standards.
Event logos represent the overall look and feel of the event and the community that’s hosting it. Keep in mind your community's brand themes, colors, and story when making an event logo. They should come together to create an impactful logo that brings people together for a successful event.
If you are looking to design an event logo, or to put together the brand standards for your community, schedule a free 20-minute consultation with us today. Learn more about our services at https://havencreativeagency.com/what-we-do/.
How to Measure Your Community’s Brand Awareness
Measuring brand awareness is like trying to bottle up perception and measure the volume. It’s extremely difficult. However, there are ways to effectively measure brand awareness if you know where to look. As a brand marketing agency, we are giving a list of metrics and tools we use at HAVEN Creative to measure brand awareness for our clients.
SURVEYS + POLLS
Surveys are an integral way to communicate with your target audience and to understand their concerns, expectations and more. Online surveys and polls are convenient ways to measure brand awareness and are extremely helpful when conducting a rebranding campaign. We kick off all of our rebrand campaigns with a survey to establish a benchmark to measure against once the rebranding campaign is complete. While there are hundreds of tools you can use to conduct online surveys, one of our favorites is SurveyMonkey because of the user-friendly interface and convenient reporting.
SOCIAL METRICS – ENGAGEMENT OVER LIKES
Brands shouldn’t be concerned with how many followers they have on their social sites because what really matters is how many of their followers are actually engaged. Track engagement levels, impressions and overall reach to measure brand awareness. When it comes to social media, engagement encapsulates a variety of actions such as a “share” on Facebook or a “like” on Instagram. It is any interaction a fan has with your social media content that shows they are interested in your posts and may want to support your brand.
WEBSITE METRICS
Keeping an eye on returning visitors and monitoring new visitors plays a significant role in measuring brand awareness. Google Analytics is a great way to acquire this data as it helps you to understand the trends your business has gone through over a period of time. You can also track views on certain pages to see if your audience is interested in certain content or topics.
MARKETING AUTOMATION SOFTWARE
For years, marketers across all industries struggled with ways to measure brand awareness while simultaneously justifying budgets with return on investment. Marketing automation software like HubSpot became the game changer. HubSpot simplifies numerous aspects of brand awareness and measurements. Website traffic, surveys and social metrics can all be tracked in the platform providing convenient, real time metrics and reporting.
DIGITAL NEWSLETTER
Email newsletters are a great way to actively communicate with your audience and a transparent way to check brand engagement. Does your list have a healthy open rate? Are your readers clicking on the email links you provide? If these measures are healthy, this signals that your community is interested and engaged with your content. Another key metric that you should measure is the unsubscribe rate or the spam rates; if the list you use has multiple spam reports or unsubscribes each time you send, you should carefully evaluate who is receiving your newsletter and what content you're including. Finally, track the rate and consistency of list growth is a key indicator of whether your audience wants to engage with your brand and content.
If you need help capturing the data for your brand awareness, HAVEN Creative®, a community brand marketing agency, now offers HubSpot setup and integration so contact us to learn more.
Best Suburb in Charlotte: HAVEN Creative client Waxhaw Wins Charlotte Magazine’s BoB Award
Congratulations to the Town of Waxhaw for winning Best Suburb in Charlotte!
For over 20 years, Charlotte magazine has dedicated its May issue to the BEST of the BEST in Charlotte, BOB for short. The Best of the Best recognizes the city's finest in food and drink, entertainment, shopping, arts and culture, and more. After the list is published, the magazine hosts an event to celebrate the winners. This year’s event was a white themed party located at the Fillmore in Uptown Charlotte. Attendees ate, drank, danced and enjoyed live entertainment.
The HAVEN Mavens™ represented at this year’s event in honor of one of our award-winning clients. The Town of Waxhaw won a BOB for Best Suburb in Charlotte, NC. They were recognized for having exceptional downtown restaurants, their close proximity to the city, and excellent public schools.
HAVEN Creative® serves as The Town of Waxhaw’s Marketing and Communications Department. The HAVEN Mavens™ are responsible for external communications, event promotions, town news, and communication of internal news to the Waxhaw community. HAVEN manages the town’s social media accounts, monthly digital news-letter, and created a complete redesign of their current logo and brand package. This package included a color story, town seal, and new logos for both the town and all major events.
Every community has a story to tell. When designing Waxhaw’s rebrand package, we decided on a rustic refined feel to mirror the existing downtown aesthetic. Through Community Branding, Waxhaw has been able to maintain their small-town feel while simultaneously optimizing quality growth.
How Much Should a Logo Cost?
A professional logo design could cost you around $500-$15,000, but let’s get one thing straight -- you don’t buy the 1-ply toilet paper for obvious reasons. The same goes for creating a brand for your business. You don’t want to just go for the cheapest logo deal when developing your brand because things can get, well, irritating.
At HAVEN Creative®, we are the “Charmin” of the creative world. Think of us as the 4-ply with aloe vera. We bring a little something extra to the table. We can just give you a logo file if that's what you want, but we prefer to provide the added comfort of a brand foundation that will give you a complete competitive edge.
How it works -
Before the first coffee date, we dig deep into your business to gauge how you already visualize your personality as a business. From there, we do a marketing audit, which includes market research and analysis to determine the best elements to tell your brand's story. We can’t give away too many of the ingredients in our secret sauce, but one thing that sets us apart from the 1-ply guys is an interior design proposal for your office or home space. This helps visualize your business and its potential beyond the design of a logo. But most importantly, it helps us justify the amount of time we spend on Pinterest. (jk, sort of)
We get asked this question from time to time: “Why should I choose you over Fiverr?” If you have never heard of Fiverr, good. The real question you should be asking is, “When can we get started?” Fiverr won’t meet with you to talk about the outlook and visions for your company. They won’t create a storyboard to create your brand story. They won’t make you laugh so hard you spit your coffee over the table talking about marketing strategies. And let’s be real- didn’t your mama tell you not to trust strangers on the internet?
Building a brand is not just about a logo file. It’s about finding the best way to tell your unique story, earning trust and building a lasting relationship with your customers. It’s also about giving our extrovert personalities something to look forward to each day. It’s about justifying our coffee habits with clients.
Contact a HAVEN Maven™ today if you want to elevate your branding and catapult your business to growth!
HAVEN Creative® Wins Communications Awards
HAVEN Creative® recently won three separate communications awards! We won FIRST PLACE for the Town of Waxhaw event logo designs from the National Association for Government Communicators. We also won two, FIRST PLACE AWARDS from the North Carolina Council and City Communicators for the digital newsletter, Waxhaw Happenings and the Fire Department Recruitment Video.
HAVEN Creative® specializes in branding and communications for communities and companies. We have worked with several municipalities and B2B companies in the manufacturing industry, providing logo design, content writing and digital newsletter production. If you are looking for a creative way to tell your brand's story with help from an award-winning agency, contact a maven today!
Why Community Branding is Important
Community branding has become the new economic development. More significant than the value of financial incentives, giving your city/town/community a brand that represents its values and beliefs will ultimately attract others to it. Community branding defines neighborhoods, revitalizes districts, packs restaurants and creates an economic buzz. A community must give its businesses the support they need beyond grand opening day. What is going to drive people to that business once it’s open? What is going to create a sense of home? What is ultimately going to make that business a success? How do you measure your community’s brand awareness? At HAVEN Creative®, our team of HAVEN Mavens™ is here to help answer these questions and create brands that define spaces and generate economic opportunities.
Given the recent downtown, even private brands have learned the power of community branding to assist with their marketing efforts. Forbes, The Power of Community Branding, mentions, "some of the world's strongest brands were originally built through low-cost community-based marketing. Nike, Starbucks, Google ... The list goes on."
There has been a shift across all generations, reprioritizing the role communities play in our lives. People are looking for more out of the places they live and work. Cities and towns that understand and tap into that can attract quality talent and businesses beyond what incentives alone ever could. The brand promise that these communities offer speaks to a growing audience looking for that, now that is economic development through community branding.
Unfortunately, many community leaders throughout the country still think that economic incentives are all they have to offer businesses and developers. They bet it all on one project with hopes that it will trigger economic growth. They discount the most powerful tool of all, the brand – by definition, the characteristics that make an area unique and attract a community that shares that vision and set of beliefs.
When speaking with community leaders, the words “branding, logos, and taglines” can become daunting and overwhelming. However, branding isn’t just fabricating something out of nothing; it’s about pinpointing what truly makes an area unique. A high-quality brand gives a location an identity that it can use to define its core values and vision.
At HAVEN Creative®, we use our proprietary Maven Method® to develop brand platforms for communities. Discover how we can help your community tell its story here.