Yale Investments
How does a university endowment feel … emotional?
Opportunity
It’s easy to fall into a landscape status quo – where you stay parallel to what you see and if nothing’s broken, don’t fix it. For a leader in the university endowment space to pave the way to a new future, the opportunity then becomes how we might reimagine what an endowment could feel like.
Ask
Create a brand for the launch of Yale Investment’s Prospect Fellowship. With this brand, redesign the Yale Investments website to reflect the vision.
What story can we tell when we’re not trying to stay with the crowd?
Strategic Vision
Recalibrate the Mission
Brands can easily become stagnant, requiring fresh thinking to restore energy and momentum. To understand the “why,” we focused on what matters most and how leadership is shaping its legacy. Grounded in mission, values, and operational pillars, we defined how Yale Investments should show up for internal teams, students, investors, the public, and beyond.
Narrative Journalism
Through discovery and immersion, we found that a university endowment can appear purely practical – almost impersonal at first glance. In reality, it carries far greater depth. It represents legacy, sustained presence, and active participation in shaping the future.
Our strategic vision was to bring that dimension to life by creating a brand that balances human connection with institutional prestige: revealing the often-overlooked facets of an endowment and making them more visible and meaningful.
Process
Discovery & Immersion
Through in-depth conversations with leadership, we connected the organization’s history and legacy with its vision for the future. This discovery phase was critical in uncovering the “why” behind our work, enabling us to develop ideas that translate ambition into a clear, realized direction.
Build
We build from the foundations of a cross-functionally collaborative approach. From ideation to wires and concepts to strategic design and development – partnerships across crafts ensure the strategic vision does not get diluted or lost during the passing of the baton.
Outcome
We developed a brand for Yale Investments’ Prospect Fellowship that seamlessly extended into the broader Yale Investments identity. The result is a deeply human, narrative-driven expression of the university’s endowment – one that highlights its impact in shaping future generations of leaders at Yale and beyond.
Nekospective x Instrument