SITUATION

The Northern California Innocence Project principals had conducted an exhaustive study in the State of California on Prosecutorial Misconduct – a significant contributor to wrongful conviction. NCIP wanted to create and brand an initiative that would use hard data from this report and others like it as a catalyst for reform of the justice system.

CHALLENGE

The report’s publication and the launch of a full website for the initiative had to take place on November 4th—9 weeks from the first meeting, because data from the Report was being used in a case before the US Supreme Court on October 5th.

SOLUTION

The Hayden Group team got to work quickly, with Ellen Rudy on brand strategy and brand image, namer Drew Letendre, Non-profit online strategist John Kenyon, Web designer Dan McKee, copywriter Rose Marie Cleese, and database programmer Derrick Kikuchi. We conducted a strategy session with all of the stakeholders to drive the positioning, and immediately began developing the brand image and the messaging based on our findings. We parallel tracked the name development. Once we had the name secured, we were able to apply that to all of the pieces. The website was created on a short time frame with all hands on deck to be sure that everything was correct and in sync. The highlight of the website is a searchable map that allows the user to find cases by county as well as search by Prosecutor or defendant name, court, year and 9 different types of misconduct!

RESULTS

The Veritas Report and The Veritas Initiative website were launched on October 4th 2010. Within the first 2 days they had 8,000 hits to the website. With a coordinated  PR effort, the Veritas story was picked up by the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, the NY Times and many other news outlets. A major TV Newsmagazine is also courting the Veritas team. And 2 weeks after the launch, the California Bar Association reported that they were looking into disciplinary action in the cases of Prosecutorial Misconduct that had been overlooked!