Client: Rainbow Children’s Village
My role: Marketing & Communications Consultant
Engagement: Consulting | Brand transformation, website refresh, fundraising communications, CRM setup
Location: West Rand, Johannesburg

The opportunity

Founded in 2005, Rainbow Children’s Village is a registered non-profit and public benefit organisation supporting vulnerable children in Johannesburg’s West Rand. Through three core initiatives, a Safe House for abused and abandoned children, a neurodiverse education partnerships with Sparrow Schools, and the Igugu Education Centre for after-school care,  Rainbow Children’s Village helps children feel safe, learn with confidence, and build brighter futures.

While Rainbow Children’s Village was strong in its core service delivery, it faced a familiar challenge for purpose-driven organisations: the work was powerful, but the brand, website, and communications didn’t reflect the credibility and trust required to grow fundraising sustainably.

Rainbow Children’s Village needed marketing support that could:

• Strengthen donor trust and confidence
• Support fundraising with clearer, more consistent communication
• Modernise the brand without losing warmth or integrity
• Build systems that a small team could realistically maintain

How the engagement worked

I was brought in as a marketing and communications consultant, working on an hourly basis and partnering closely with Rainbow’s Children’s Village leadership and operational team.

The primary objective was to improve their fundraising ability by ensuring the organisation looked, sounded, and operated like a fundable organisation: consistent, credible, and trustworthy across every touchpoint.

This required:

• A brand overhaul to ensure consistency and professionalism
• Clearer and consistent messaging aligned to their three initiatives
• A refreshed website that could function as a central storytelling and donation platform
• Stronger fundraising communications and templates
• The right systems to manage donors and supporter relationships

What I delivered

I led an end-to-end brand, digital, and communications transformation, ensuring Rainbow Children’s Village had the foundations needed to grow with confidence.

This included:

• Brand evolution and identity refresh, including a new logo and updated corporate identity (CI) that honoured Rainbow’s legacy while modernising its look and feel
• New Brand guidelines, enabling consistent use across all communications
• Website refresh, including design, structure, copywriting, and content flow, making the site clearer, warmer, and more donor-friendly (https://rainbowchildrensvillage.co.za/)
• Fundraising and communications strategy, aligned to donor engagement and trust-building
• Reusable proposal and communications templates, reducing friction for a small team
• Marketing materials and flyers, supporting campaigns, events, and appeals

All assets were designed to be practical, reusable, and sustainable, not dependent on constant external support.

Digital, social, and systems foundations

To support ongoing engagement, I also:

• Set up Rainbow’s social media accounts, establishing tone, structure, and content direction
• Developed content frameworks and templates for ongoing use
• Worked with a contracted social media resource (via Janana Banana Consulting) to manage content creation and community management

Alongside the creative and strategic work, I helped Rainbow Children’s Village set up HubSpot as their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

I supported them to implement and manage their HubSpot CRM, maintaining donor records and running personalised email campaigns. It supported centralised, structured management of donor records, and allowed us to use the platform to send bulk, personalised email campaigns to donors and supporters. This allowed fundraising communications to become more targeted, measurable, and effective.

This model allowed Rainbow Children’s Village to benefit from professional marketing execution without needing a full in-house team.

The impact

• Rainbow now has a clear, cohesive, and credible brand aligned to its mission and values
• The refreshed website supports storytelling, trust, and donations more effectively
• Fundraising communications are more consistent, professional, and donor-ready
• Donor data and communications are now structured, trackable, and scalable
• Marketing shifted from ad hoc support to a foundational function enabling fundraising and growth

What this says about how I work

This engagement reflects how I support purpose-driven organisations that are strong at delivery but need help becoming fundable. I bring strategic clarity, hands-on execution, and systems thinking, ensuring marketing doesn’t just look good, but actively enables trust, funding, and long-term sustainability.

I’m particularly drawn to work where credibility matters deeply, resources are constrained, and the stakes are human. My role is to build marketing and communications foundations that allow organisations like Rainbow Children’s Village to focus on what they do best: caring for vulnerable children and changing lives.