New GOAL Curriculum Product Unveiled
GOAL, a non-profit organization located in Atlanta, is one of our longest client relationships, and is a relationship that signifies our commitment to making goodwill and giveback to our community a core part of Matter.
Over the years, we have contributed to the organization’s growth by developing several iterations of the GOAL identity and building several versions of the GOAL web site. After seven years of providing camps and weekend programs for middle school girls, GOAL, a non-profit organization located in Atlanta, is now bringing its unique curriculum to more girls by working with schools, community groups and youth-serving organizations.
GOAL enlisted Matter to help take their brand and product to the next level. This meant transforming the heart of their product, their curriculum, into a highly functional, user-friendly, and highly valuable package system.
Founded in 1997, GOAL originally developed and delivered programs through an active outdoor summer camp and several follow-up weekends throughout the school year. In 2003, in an effort to maximize the number of girls reached, the GOAL Board of Directors made the decision to change the GOAL program delivery model by collaborating with partners who need effective, girl-specific programming. This strategic decision allowed GOAL to capitalize on the strength of its experiential programs and the proven training model, which addresses the issues that middle school girls face, and package those programs and models into a high quality, deployable set of content.
When Matter got a look at the content, it saw the enormous potential of the content being limited by its organization and presentation. GOAL needed a package that was portable, functional, durable, expert, and sophisticated. GOAL also wanted to reduce bulk, make the content basic but immediately usable, shippable, modular, all within preset budget guidelines.
This presented some interesting design challenges for the team, including creating intuitive wayfinding through the curriculum through consistent numbering and color-coding, cleaning and trimming redundant content across the curricula, editing and organizing content, researching vendors to reduce price per unit cost of a unique custom package, maintaining color consistency across vendors and materials, and developing an intuitive, easy-to-use interface for the electronic component of the package. Matter worked through many iterations to set the conceptual and stylistic direction for the encapsulated pieces.
In the end, Matter created materials including a GOAL curriculum box, activity cards, GOALpower cards, a CD with downloadable curriculum and training, a user interface for the CD, and module activities that enhanced and elevated the GOAL brand to become a nationally recognized girls’ curriculum. The box and pieces were multifunctional—they operate as a curriculum, but also as a gateway of communication between licensed partners and GOAL, and as a marketing tool all-in-one.
The new package is to be rolled out at GOAL’s annual fundraising event in October of 2007.