Who is TIIP?

The Table of Impact Investment Practitioners (TIIP) brings together the expertise and energy of Canada’s social finance fund managers to power more economically generative, environmentally sustainable, socially just and inclusive communities.

With a network of 35+ social finance leaders across Canada, they amplify and accelerate capital into social finance initiatives across the country.

Before diving into the brand strategy, we wanted to solidify our understanding of the social finance landscape in Canada. Who were the key players in the space? What was TIIP’s funding structure? What were some of the trends and challenges we needed to be aware of?

From secondary research, ecosystem mapping and 6 stakeholder interviews, we were able to understand how TIIP was at the forefront of the social finance ecosystem in Canada.

Our biggest challenge was building a brand strategy that effectively represented TIIP’s vibrantly diverse community of member-funds, ecosystem partners and policy makers.

From our research, we positioned them as the 'heroes' of social finance, as an inspiring team of leaders whom the social finance practitioners and intermediaries look to for guidance and insight.

TIIP's previous name NIIPt (National Impact Investment Practitioners Table) was descriptive, but difficult to pronounce.

As a highly respected community of practice, our challenge was to update the existing name, while retaining the brand equity they had developed over the years.

We kept the ‘T’ (for ‘Table’) to maintain familiarity and reshuffled the previous acronym to create a simplified name that reflects the brand’s values and personality.

The goal for the UX strategy was to enable TIIP’s diverse audience to easily navigate relevant resources and directories on the site. Collaborating with the TIIP team, we synthesized and prioritized the goals of TIIP’s stakeholders together to guide the homepage layout.

By clearly defining each CTA for both primary and secondary audiences, we were able to design the content flow of the wireframes to match the motivations of each audience.

The exciting aspect of this project was learning about the social finance domain and understanding all the key players. Because TIIP is an overarching organization of leaders a challenge we faced was creating a strategy that accounted for their numerous different audiences. By asking specific questions and working closely with the TIIP team, we were able to understand who were designing for.

Impact

The new brand has been launched and is visible at their website here. The success of the project was being able to bring the people and community into focus within the domain of finance.