Case Study · 01
Common Good Church
Building a new institution from a blank page. As co-founder and communications lead, I created the complete brand identity, designed and wrote the website, authored the donor-facing prospectus, and drafted the governance framework—every public-facing word and pixel of a new nonprofit.
The Challenge
Most communications work happens inside an existing institution—there's already a name, a logo, an audience, a history. This project had none of that. Common Good Church is a new congregation being planted in Ann Arbor, and it needed everything an institution needs to exist in public: a name that carries a conviction, a visual identity, a website, a case for support that could persuade funders, and the legal architecture to operate.
The positioning had to do real work. Ann Arbor is a city where active religious participation has fallen from 44% to 31% in four years—yet a third of its residents are new each year, and the fastest-growing segment is families with school-aged kids. The brand needed to speak credibly to people who are skeptical of church but still looking for community, depth, and a place to do good work.
The Brand
The identity is built around the tagline—a Jesus-centered collaborative of makers, growers, and caretakers—and a custom typographic wordmark whose interlocking letterforms carry the idea of collaboration into the mark itself. The system pairs the wordmark with warm, documentary photography of Ann Arbor rather than stock imagery: the city itself is the visual subject, because the city is the point.
Four workstreams, one founder-communicator
Brand identity
Naming conviction, custom wordmark, typographic system, photographic direction
Website
Information architecture, visual design, animated marks, and all copy—commongoodannarbor.org
Prospectus
Donor-facing case for support: demographic and market analysis, phased launch strategy, three-year operating budget
Governance
Bylaws for a Michigan ecclesiastical corporation, financial controls, conflict-of-interest policy
The Website
The site at commongoodannarbor.org is a long-form narrative argument, not a brochure. It walks a reader from conviction (“why Common Good?”) through evidence (“why Ann Arbor?”—built on original demographic research) to vision, plan, and team. The research is real: population growth projections, religious participation trends, and county-level data on need, structured so a skeptical reader—or a funder—can follow the reasoning.
Writing the case for support and designing the site that delivers it—strategy and production as one continuous act.
What This Demonstrates
Zero-to-one institution building. Every other project in this portfolio happened inside an organization that already existed; this one shows what I do with a truly blank page—research, positioning, identity design, web design, long-form persuasive writing, and legal-financial structuring, executed as a single coherent effort.
For a hiring manager, it's also the most current evidence: this is the caliber of work I produce right now, unassisted by an existing brand's momentum.