If you haven’t seen ‘15000 kids and counting’, chances are a friend will soon tell you it’s a must watch and if you haven’t heard about it at all we’d be shocked. 

The Channel 4 series provided an in depth insight into the adoption process in the UK from social workers, to birth parents and adopters. The shocking truths of the process and the ordeal families face, is incredible.

Somewhere in the intense process of assessments, paperwork and training, foster carers come into play; a network of people whose career is looking after the children taken into care. With an average of one child being taken into care every 20 minutes, the need for good foster carers is constant; after all growing trust and confidence is a full time job and one that some people aren’t aware they’d be great at.

Foster Care Fortnight is an annual initiative from the Fostering Network, one of the UK’s leading charities for foster care. The fortnight of events and activities is the UK's biggest foster carer recruitment campaign.

Why are we telling you this? Apart from the fact it’s a fantastic campaign, which deserves support, we’ve been working with an independent foster agency (IFA) as it tries to encourage more people to become full time foster carers.

Team Fostering is an organisation that provides a unique foster care service throughout the UK, independent of local authorities, with an ethos based on putting the future of the children in their care first. 

After working hard on the company’s online presence and developing the Team Fostering brand digitally, it has become important for the development of the organisation to ensure the brand is consistent throughout all marketing collateral, so the team decided to enlist the support of a marketing and design agency. Of course we were delighted to take their call.

As a not for profit agency, Team Fostering is a truly ethical organisation with a reputation for honesty, reliability and professionalism – and we understood immediately that this should be clearly translated in the public facing marketing materials.

Market research undertaken by Team Fostering demonstrated that the company website is currently its most valuable marketing asset, as most initial enquiries are a result of visiting the site, therefore online and digital marketing has been at the heart of promotional activity in recent years. 

However, in order to keep consistency throughout the organisation, Team Fostering wanted its offline marketing materials to be brought in line with the digital communications. 

After an initial consultation we came up to come up with a proposal - starting initially with the company brochure - for the design of the Team Fostering marketing collateral, as well as creating brand guidelines for the organisation.

Our Creative Director, Gemma Waller knew that the values inherent in Team Fostering as an organisation set it apart from its competitors, so the main aim for our design work is to create materials, which clearly differentiate Team Fostering from its competitors. Team Fostering work differently to other IFAs, which makes them stand out from the crowd – so the same principle should apply to their marketing materials.

“Ultimately, Team Fostering’s objective is to attract both people new to fostering and existing foster carers who work with other IFAs. This can be achieved by creating a quality product that clearly communicates the company values through the use of case studies, strong imagery and easy to read and well presented information.”

“We came up with a design that used both photographs and illustration to convey the importance of the job of a foster carer, whilst remaining approachable so that potential new carers will know that they won’t be overwhelmed by new responsibility but that they’ll be part of a fully supported team, working together for the best of the children in their care.”

The main motif running throughout the design of the materials is a flower, that we see grow from a seed into a flower surrounded by other flowers. 

Gemma explained, “We wanted to find a good analogy of the foster carers’ journey that could be represented by strong visual clues, making our message as clear as possible to people who are new to the process.”

It starts with just considering the idea, or ‘planting the seed’ then the various support, from the agency which nurtures the carer, helping them grow into an ideal foster carer who can go on to nurture and protect the children in their care.

Gemma added, “What works well with this specific example is the same process can be applied to the journey of a child in care too.”

“Knowing how important it was for the team to stand out from the crowd, we took the design one step further by changing the shape of the brochure the finished square shaped folds out to reveal the illustrated foster carers journey, it makes a change from the standard A4 brochure.”

Sarah Rendall, is Team Fostering’s marketing officer, she said, “It was clear from the initial briefing with Kerry and Gemma that they really understood the values and ethos of Team Fostering and how important this is to us. Their creativity shone through in the concept and the end result is a brochure, which communicates who we are and helps us to stand out in a competitive market. We have received great feedback from those who have received it and look forward to working together to apply the concept to our other marketing materials.”

To find out more about becoming a foster carer with Team Fostering visit their website: www.teamfostering.co.uk.