It was a fine Sunday morning and I had a meeting. The meeting was with Mishka Social Services (MSS), a non-profit organization based in Hamilton that I had been volunteering with for about 3.5 years. This meeting was my official “inauguration” as a member of the MSS board. It was the start of my new role as the Brand and Marketing Officer.

I entered this with a few points on my agenda on how best I thought we could move forward because I knew the organization needed a re-brand for the general public and the team. We needed to take our brand and marketing seriously if we wanted others to take us seriously.

So I brought up my first action item: I needed to get approval for changing the logo for Mishka Social Services, and one of it’s biggest projects, Barakah Box (a food bank serving about 300 families a month). I accepted some backlash since I knew that the logos were around for a couple years and both the board and general volunteers were rather attached to them. But the, much to my surprise I got the go-ahead with literally no push-back. I was happy, and everyone else seemed happy to I continued down my list of action items, which I knew would be much less “controversial”.

Fast forward one month to the next meeting. Another fine Sunday morning.

The meeting was progressing and it came my turn to talk about the ideas I have for the new MSS logo. I started off with a statement along the lines of: “so since we decided last meeting that we would change the logo…” and I was immediately received with a, “wait you are completely changing the logo, I thought you would just fix the font.”

*Que imaginary facepalm*

In that moments I realized the biggest challenge I will face with future clients is probably clear communication. Now in this case it wasn’t a huge deal, thankful the current logo was pretty decent and they liked some of my sketches which still paid homage to the current logo.

But sometimes a small misunderstanding can lead to big issues and lots of lost time. This became a lesson in the importance of transparent and straightforward communication and even getting written permission/consent from the client around what needs to be done.

Reference

https://www.brainyquote.com/lists/topics/top_10_communication_quotes