The participation and engagement of children and young people is central to the Office of the Advocate for Children and Young People. With this in mind, it was critical to involve children and young people in the creation of the brand from the very beginning of the process.

The first step was involving children and young people in the creation of our brand by conducting focus groups. The focus groups provided feedback on key concepts and words that should be associated with the office, what the brand should look like both online and offline and even the preferred colour palette.

Following these consultations, we engaged a branding agency, who to further the theme of empowering children and young people, chose their youngest member of staff to lead the project of creating the ACYP brand.The agency then involved students from a local design course to work on the look and feel of the brand by creating campaigns which fed into the final design concept. Students were also asked to design a campaign on an issue that would improve the lives of children and young people.

Following the creation of the brand concept, we presented the concepts back to children and young people who took part in the original focus groups.

“We sat down with the Advocate and said, ‘this is how we feel the Office of the Advocate for Children and Young People should be presented to young people,’ and that is exactly what we got word for word. It came back picture perfect, what we said was listened to,” Brenella Rehin, current member of the NSW Youth Advisory Council said when speaking about her experience of being involved in the creation of the Advocate for Children and Young People’s brand. “As a young person it feels so good to see something you have said actually come to fruition,” Ms Rehin added.