Seven essential steps for rebranding a trust

As digital technologies reshape education, many trusts are reassessing their brand to ensure it accurately represents who they are and what they stand for.

While rebranding might be dismissed as a vanity project or unnecessary expense, your brand is a visible representation of who you are. It speaks to the people who matter most: your staff, young people and communities.

But rebranding is not something to be taken lightly. It is much more than a catchy new name or jazzy logo. It’s about communicating your trust’s values, mission, and goals – and you only get one shot at it.

Here’s what we learned from rebranding Academies Enterprise Trust (AET) to Lift Schools.

Start with ‘the why’

Before redesigning your brand, clarify why you are doing it. Is your visual design outdated? Have your mission, vision or values evolved? This will drive the scope of your project, how long it will take and who needs to be involved.

For us, the answer was all of the above. In addition, AET had never been trademarked, so we didn’t fully own our intellectual property.

Establish where you are now

Evaluate before you plan. What do people know and believe about your trust? Are your vision, mission, and values consistently represented across your schools?

We started with a perception audit to assess public awareness and understanding of AET. Despite being one of the largest networks of schools in the country, people didn’t know what we stood for.

More importantly, our schools felt disconnected, with varying interpretations of an outdated vision. This reaffirmed our plan to go further than changing our name. We wanted to invest in every school and establish Lift Schools as a mission-driven trust.

Define what is important to you

There are two steps here: defining who you are and establishing your voice.

To achieve these, we conducted a detailed strategic review of our mission, values, strategy and goals. Then we developed a tone of voice and style guide, along with key beliefs that everyone associated with Lift Schools should understand.

Together, this guided the visual aspects of our brand, ensuring consistency and clarity.

Develop a comprehensive plan

Rebranding is complex and requires meticulous planning.  We created 11 workstreams, each with hundreds of interrelated actions.

It also requires the right project structure: clear governance procedures for decision making, regular progress monitoring and reporting, and a project team focused on execution.

Cost is an important consideration too. The creation of our brand came in at just under £45,000, which is excellent value.  Over the course of the roll-out across our 57 schools, it will represent a six-figure level of investment. 

But it means every school will have new signage, updated websites and displays, which were needed anyway. And we’ve also used this as an opportunity reduce costs for  families, including reviewing uniform policies to reduce the number of branded items.

Engage people

Rebranding isn’t just changing your website, it’s about telling an internal story of your trust’s identity. Engage your principals, trustees, and central leaders from the outset; their input is essential for a smooth transition.

Design

Then comes the creative phase – the most enjoyable but also the most challenging! 

We reviewed hundreds of potential names that met certain criteria, including simplicity and distinctiveness, all while balancing individual preferences from the launch team. Our design team then created logos, colour palettes and other visual elements that reflected our mission and values.

At every step, feedback is essential. We tested and refined these concepts, ensuring they were functional across different formats and accessible to all.

Plan an effective launch

A strong launch is about how people feel when they hear the news.

We started planning ours six months in advance, every detail carefully sequenced and timed. Constant communication across the launch team and tracking every action step-by-step ensured we remained on track.

A rebrand is a complex process. It involves deep reflection and strategic planning, establishing who we are and what we believe, and it can be a powerful tool to renew our commitments.

For us, it was an opportunity to start the new academic year with a fresh name and renewed commitment to providing an excellent education in every classroom, every day.