Sloan Industry Centers

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, one of the nation’s leading foundations on science and technology established 19 Industry Centers. Each Sloan Industry Center specializes in industry-specific research for corporations and related trade organizations. Based in America’s most prestigious academic institutions including Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pennsylvania, and many others, Center faculty address such diverse industries as finance, powder metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, trucking, retail food, semiconductors, and managed care.

To facilitate expansion and diversify the funding support of the Sloan Foundation’s Industry Centers, LGI was engaged to retroactively create a brand "halo" for the Centers, positioning them as an integrated network for the very first time. The cornerstone of this communications effort was a high-impact network brochure – strategically defined, designed, written and printed for presentation to the Sloan Board of Trustees within a very short turnaround period of six weeks.

To meet this challenge, the LGI team combed existing secondary research data, conducted competitive analyses, conducted one-on-one interviews with key Center personnel and developed a brand strategy that united the Centers through their strengths, yet provided a credible springboard for maintaining their individuality. Further, LGI assisted Sloan Foundation executives with facilitating buy-in of the directors, researchers, authors and professors at the Centers themselves. Lastly, the LGI team developed and implemented a national dissemination plan for the finished brochures that was consistent with the brand strategy. The Foundation recently approached the agency to create a new version of the piece to reflect its current expansion of five additional Industry Centers. In addition, the firm developed a Web site based on the brochure to ensure broad electronic availability.

Other LGI initiative branding stories include the Ford Foundation Corporate Involvement Initiative, the Ford Foundation Affinity Group in Development Finance, and many others.