Policing Transitions: 5 Tips for Branding a New Police Service
If you’re building a new municipal or provincial police service, it’s important to have an experienced branding and graphic design agency working alongside your transition or development team, so that everything you need to recruit and deploy is ready to go when you are.
Your agency brand will play a pivotal role in creating trust, engagement, and credibility. If you’re starting a new agency, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a brand that is authentic, meaningful, and modern – one that the community you serve, your employees, and potential partners will connect with and become loyal to for years to come.
But how do you start the brand-building process – and when is the right time to engage a team? Indalma Creative has worked collaboratively with two, new municipal police services, in two different provinces, as the communities they serve transition from RCMP contract policing to a municipal police department. (Take a look at our work for Surrey Police Service and Grande Prairie Police Service.)
To date, we are the only design and branding agency in Canada with police agency transition experience, and we share five tips and one checklist below to help you get started.
1. Hire your branding and design team 9 to 12 months before you need uniforms
When you’re building a new police service it’s easy to put branding at the bottom of the list, as it seems less urgent than the operational issues.
Until you need a crest, uniforms, or vehicle graphics. Then it becomes urgent.
In our experience, the ideal time to engage a branding team is 9-12 months before your first recruits will be hired, to give them the necessary time for stakeholder consultation and thoughtful brand development. Strong agency brands aren’t built overnight – they take thought and they take time. And, unlike commercial brands, during development they are subject to public scrutiny, input from stakeholders outside the organization, and often lengthy approval processes (see our section on the timeline for crest design).
2. Engage an experienced team that understands the requirements of police brands
There are many good reasons to hire a branding and design team with specific police branding and transition experience, but here are three of the most compelling:
Police branding is a specialty. A team that understands policing culture, industry issues, and the public expectations and design requirements that affect police service branding and communication can save you time and errors.
Expert suppliers can free up your team’s time. Policing transitions can take three to five years and absorb all of your staff’s time, skill, and attention on the operational side. A branding team with transition experience knows what is needed and when, can act as knowledgeable advisors, and can execute branding and design projects while your staff continues to focus on the day-to-day.
Your brand assets will represent you for a long time. Major assets like your crest will represent your organization for years to come – make sure they will stand the test of time. A team with police branding experience understands the technical requirements for designing those assets, and how to work creatively within their restraints to express an identity that is both unique and professional.
3. Develop a solid foundation for your brand with a meaningful brand identity
Before you fly your flag, you need to know what it stands for. This means that before your team can design your agency’s most visible brand assets – your crest, logos, and vehicle graphics – you need to develop a well-thought-out brand identity that is unique to your agency and the community you serve. You need to define who you are, and what your promise is to your community and your employees.
Your brand identity includes your values, personality, and voice. It defines how your brand will look, sound, and act everywhere it appears, and it’s the foundation on which all of your agency’s assets are built. Your identity also informs your brand strategy – “where, what and how” you’ll use your new brand visuals and stories to launch your brand and engage with your employees and the public.
At Indalma, we use a Discovery process to develop a brand identity. We talk to key stakeholders and team members to find out who you are, what you stand for, your promise to your community, your goals, and what makes you unique. We do our research, identify your audiences, opportunities and challenges, and then bring all of that information into a single document that serves as a decision-making tool going forward.
During your first year, the findings in the Discovery help to inform your marketing communication decisions as you assemble your recruiting and communications teams, create marketing materials, and develop social media and website content. It’s a useful reference that details your brand goals, key messages, and considerations, and can be used during your onboarding process to help new team members get to know your brand and what it stands for.
4. Budget 3 to 5 months for crest design and approval – more if you want a crown
Your crest is a source of pride for your officers and your community, and it takes time to design something unique – yet appropriate – and get buy-in from all of the key stakeholders.
It’s the first major brand asset you’re likely to produce and you should allow three to five months for it to be designed and approved, depending on how much consultation is required with groups outside the agency. If the crest will depict the royal crown, the approval process will require even longer. Crests with the crown must be approved by the Canadian Heraldic Authority and this can take up to a year.
5. Create a brand style guide to ensure consistency as you grow
A new brand is an investment, and to build it requires a unified and consistent approach. A style guide provides guidelines for using your brand assets consistently across applications – from which fonts to use, to your photography style, to the ways in which your logo can be represented.
It’s easy for a fast-growing organization to lose control of its brand’s appearance if employees and suppliers aren’t working from the same rule book. To build trust, your brand should look, sound, and act the same everywhere it appears. Brand consistency builds confidence that your agency will be dependable and professional in all your interactions.
Typical branding and marketing materials required to launch a new police service. (We can help with all of them!)
Stationary package (business cards, letterhead, email signature)
Website content
Signage
PowerPoint presentation deck
Social media strategy, assets, and content
Social media management
Recruiting materials: website and social media content, trade show materials
Marketing campaigns for recruiting and brand launch
Crest / logo
Police Commission or Board logo
Core values
Motto, mission and vision statements
Crest story
Visual identity system (logo lockups, typography, colour palette etc.)
Shoulder flash
Vehicle graphics
Brand style guide
Give your new brand the time and effort it deserves
Give your new agency brand the time and effort it deserves by engaging an experienced branding and design team early in the development process. It’s planning that will pay off in the long term, and the right team will take care of the details and help you execute a seamless launch. (If you’d like to see some of Indalma’s work for police services, please visit our project pages for individual agencies, and our policing services section.)
Want to learn more? Indalma Creative has been working with Canadian police agencies since 2011. Our Chief Brand Strategist, Angela McGregor, can answer any questions you might have about building a new police brand, or refreshing an existing one. You can reach her at angela@indalmacreative.com
Looking for more ideas from StudioTalk?
StudioTalk is our free, quarterly newsletter full of practical design, branding, and customer relationship-building ideas to help you grow your business.