DAI
Doing good can feel, well, really good
Focus:
Employer Brand Transformation & Value Strategy Development
Key Elements:
Decision-Dynamics Research, Creative Direction, Content Strategy, UX Design, Career Site Reinvention, Storytelling.
The Challenge
Since 1970, DAI has worked in more than 150 countries, tackling the world's most persistent problems — inefficient markets, ineffective governance, and instability. Three thousand employees operating across every development context imaginable, from stable high-growth economies to environments shaped by conflict. Clients ranged from national governments to bilateral donors to private philanthropies.
For an organization doing work of that scale and consequence, DAI's employer brand hadn't kept pace. The visual and creative language was generic corporate — nothing that reflected the depth, complexity, or mission-driven character of the people actually doing the work. For a talent audience drawn from government, academia, and industry — people considering DAI as a calling — that gap mattered.
The challenge was connection. DAI needed to communicate what it's like to be someone who does this work, and why, for the right person, there is no better place to do it.
Finding the Insight
Global surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder workshops across DAI's workforce revealed something that hadn't been clearly articulated: the people who work at DAI think in terms of purpose. A calling, felt across every team and region we spoke with.
What was specific to DAI was the texture of that calling. Employee-owned and operated since its founding, DAI had built a culture where integrity was the operating principle holding together teams working in environments where the usual rules didn't apply. The work could change from one project to the next, one country to the next. What remained constant was the commitment to doing it with rigor and honesty
The target audience — mid-career professionals from government, academia, and industry considering a transition into development work — needed to feel the specificity of that culture, not just the scale of the mission.
The Strategy
The calling was real. The culture was genuine. What was missing was the creative and narrative sophistication to express it in a way that matched the intelligence and seriousness of the audience DAI needed to reach.
We built the brand around depth — bringing people and their work, their reasons and their realities, closer together. Immersive, human-centered, and honest about what the work demands and what it gives back.
What We Built
The career site was designed as a holistic brand experience — the primary destination for a global audience approaching DAI from any background, any region, any career stage. Field photography placed people in the actual contexts of the work. Employee voices were specific and unguarded. Content was organized around the questions a serious candidate would actually ask.
"Ethical. Innovative. Employee-owned." Three words that said something real and specific about DAI's identity. The employee-ownership structure was a genuine differentiator — a signal that DAI's commitment to the work was structural, not rhetorical. The content strategy went deep on the why — why people chose this work, what it asked of them, what it made possible. For an audience already oriented toward purpose, the job was to give form to something they already felt and show them that DAI was the place to act on it.
The Result
Nearly a decade later, the work is still live and still serving as DAI's primary employer brand expression. In international development, where organizational credibility is built slowly and guarded carefully, that longevity is its own measure of success. The strategy proved durable because it was built on something true — an honest articulation of who DAI people are and why the work matters.
For the right person, it still is.