City of Guelph – Smart Cities
Branding & Communication Strategy
We love food. And we love supporting important community initiatives that tackle climate change, business innovation and food insecurity. When this opportunity came our way, we knew it would be educational, purposeful and ground-breaking.
Municipal communications is in our blood and The Letter M team has enjoyed a long relationship with the City of Guelph. In 2019, the City invited our team to partner on a communications and engagement strategy for its joint vision with Wellington County to create Canada’s first modern circular food economy. Inspired by nature’s systems, a circular economy strives to eliminate or find new value from waste, reduce emissions and in the process build a stronger community.
Our work started with initial identity and messaging leadership to create and launch the Our Food Future brand and initial public communications efforts to help the municipalities land the $10 Million first prize finish in the Smart Cities Challenge, with a four-year mandate to bring their circular ideas to life. As agency of record, our support has included communications strategy and implementation, graphic design, public relations and community engagement campaigns, storytelling, media relations, website, presentations and multimedia production.
Broad community collaboration across more than 60 active projects has been foundational to the success of this initiative. This called for strong focus on creating common tools, language and approaches that harness the collective communications power and bandwidth to create a united voice and community imperative to improve our food system.
Testimonial
“The City has sought TLM’s expertise in the areas of brand management, media relations, critical issues management and—of course—creative services and design on a number of occasions over the years. We have always been beyond satisfied with the solid counsel and exceptional products TLM has produced for us”
Tara Sprigg, Manager, Corporate Communications
The City of Guelph