Since 1995, Bolton’s Portfolio Creative Agency have provided branding services to some of the UK’s biggest brands, including Timberland. But for the past few years, CEO Darren Clare and his team have also focused their efforts on helping charities and community groups.
Their non-profit work began when they were approached by a local triathlon group with a request for funds. Instead, Clare says, he wanted to “leave them with a legacy”. He and his team created a brand for them free of charge.
“If you design a poster that makes somebody look at it and think, ‘You know what, I am going to have a go at that,’ that changes their life for the better. That’s a brilliant thing,” Clare says. “That really inspires me – that you can change somebody’s life just by creating a poster or a social media post.”
Small charities, he adds, often “really want to change stuff, but they haven’t got a big budget, so whatever they’ve got, we’ll do it for that.
“During lockdown, I put a couple of [social media] posts out saying, ‘I’m looking for work, but there’s not a lot of work out there at the moment. If anybody wants anything done, send it through and we’ll do it free of charge’ – it was just to keep my mind going. A couple of local charities took us up on that.
“You get work off the back of that anyway, so good comes from doing good, but we don’t do it to reap the rewards. We do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
