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  • Lobos FC
    Transforming the soccer reality
    Strategy | Identity | Communication | Tools

    How do we empower a soccer team for the blind to gain visibility and seize the reins of both personal and team-related growth?

    The Mexico State Lobos were founded with the conviction that anyone has the right to practice professional, high-performance sports with no regard to physical disabilities. Through soccer, they seek to sensitize society at large about the prevention and treatment of blindness and inspire greater integration within that community. Despite their admirable vision, the Lobos were more a dream that needed to come true. To do it, they had to generate independent revenue and build a sustainable growth and evolution motor.

    High-Impact Opportunity

    The Thrust project had an ally in Caribou Visual Studio, a production agency that uses multimedia content to tell pointed, impactful stories. After seeing the Lobos’ problematics, and potential, as agents of change, Caribou Visual invited us to join a shared cause.

    At first, the project was a handful of mentoring sessions focused on coming up with general recommendations to improve operations on and off the field. But when we sat down with the team to hear its story, vision and challenges, we realized that without a strategy and tools that would give them a chance to build the brand, visibility and a fundraising system, they could not sustainably move forward nor achieve desired impacts.

    First Things First

    We understood that beyond just being a soccer team, Los Lobos are agents of social change and we had an opportunity to help them impact the national soccer league, Liga FC, their families and Mexico’s non-sighted community.

    To get there, we designed an operative model that covers different need levels. Everything from what would help optimize the operation, like a civil-society registry for accepting donations; to tools for exponential growth and impacts; “commercializable” image-development and activities focused on awareness about challenges and opportunities in this vulnerable community.

    A Symbol of Change

    As part of an inclusion, commercialization and professionalization strategy, we created a new identity to frame the next phase of response to internal and external audiences. The brand was designed by taking the principal users’ (Los Lobos) as the point-of-departure, and leveraged haptic design principles thanks to which the athletes could for the first time feel the crests on their jerseys as well as the message behind the team they represent on and off the field.

    Expanding Impacts

    Additionally, we helped Los Lobos design B2B sales tools to optimize fundraising through a benefits system, as well as a B2C digital communications strategy. Based on four strategic lines—adaptive sports, blindness in Mexico, the Lobos and the overarching Liga FC—we helped the cause go viral and align younger generations’ priorities and beliefs within a new digital environment.

    A Step Forward

    With the vision and strategy implementation, Los Lobos have become one of the most professional teams, and now enjoy greater potential within the Mexico Soccer League for the Blind.

    Three months of cooperation were sufficient to structure the team, expand the project, lend visibility to the movement and learn how as a society and as individuals we have a long way to go to get to true inclusion for all Mexicans.

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