What We Care About.
- Strengthening the crucial role of small and mid-sized cultural organizations in communities.
- Shifting the arts and culture field to lead by purpose, not programs.
- Connecting arts organizations to their communities with authenticity, relevance, and relationship.
- Operating with trust as the currency of connection.
- Providing a process that honors and elevates the values of our clients and their community.
- Protecting the cultural arts as a safe place for nurturing understanding and plural expression.
- Turning traditional arts branding into bold new strategies for capacity, growth, and sustainability.
- The emotional power of being bold, captivating, and human in sharing who we are.
- Joining projects that create joy, cherished relationships, and opportunities for reciprocal learning.
We See Breakthrough. Do You?
Surale Phillips
Partner, Brand Research
Laura Bessinger-Morse
Partner, Brand Messaging
Cheryl Baldwin
Partner, Brand Design
Profound Insight. Surale’s superpower is data, bringing laser-like focus to questions and answers about your mission’s perception, value, relevance, and impact. Her expertise was honed over two decades and hundreds of arts and cultural projects across the United States. She digs deep into interviews, focus groups, surveys, psychographics (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles), and consumer demand to get clear results that reveal the real you and define where you need to go next.
Transformative Words. Laura’s magic is in the written brand, elevating your message to evoke emotion, create connection, and position your unique and powerful voice. But what makes her craft so compelling are the years spent doing what you do: running museums and nonprofits, fundraising, and managing communications. Laura’s executive experience informs the strategy behind the moving words she curates to raise your voice, shape your culture, and build your following.
Captivating, Meaningful Design. Over her 30 years as a graphic designer and creative professional, Cheryl’s enviable gift for style evolved with a mission-driven intent to design visual identities that move and engage people. Each design is packed with meaning and purpose, to motivate your audience to feel, think, and act. Under Cheryl’s eye for the extraordinary, DRMTM brands create an experience for everyone they touch, illustrating your power to awe audiences and convert them to true believers.
Kheli Willetts, PhD
Director, Brand Culture and Implementation
Growth, Strategy, and Inspiration. Kheli serves as DRMTM’s brand culture and operations consultant. She is a recognized sector leader in Nonprofit Organizations, Arts Programming, Communication, Community Engagement, Organizational Leadership, Standard Operating Procedure, Infrastructure Development, and DEIA. Dr. Kheli’s expert facilitation builds authentic brand culture that increases capacity and impact across your operations and community engagement initiatives.
DRMTM on DEIA.
The members of DRMTM have been committed to DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access) principles and implementation throughout their careers, working with expert resources to educate themselves and clients on branding through a DEIA lens.
DRMTM model + principal partners.
To support their process with authenticity and facilitate a deeper understanding of the social and cultural dynamics facing clients in the locations they work, DRMTM partners with local professionals who represent the people and issues arts organizations must address to serve as true and relevant members of their distinct communities. We choose consultants and collaborations that further DRMTM’s vision and capacity to deliver bold brands of every scale and scope to arts and culture organizations. Meet our trusted family of experts and leaders from around the nation.
The Interview
1. How do you pronounce your name?
It’s Dream Team, a familiar saying. When we began working together we just started calling ourselves the Dream Team because we loved our skills combo. One day we wrote it on a folder in this shortened version, and it stuck. We looked at each other like, “Seriously? It was there all the time.” We are a small company, but it’s a big name, like our vision.
2. What does DRMTM specialize in?
We specialize in different and daring. It’s in our tagline: arts + culture brands reimagined. DRMTM builds brands that are fearless in connecting to their community.
To work with your brand is to take on your reason for existence. Your brand is your cause, your culture, and your emotional connection to people. If it doesn’t hold meaning for the people experiencing it, your mission and everything you do is lost.
When a local arts agency or cultural institution finds itself disconnected from its mission and its people, our process determines the strategy that will revitalize their place in the hearts of the community. We open windows for cultural agencies to find the freedom to become what they were meant to be.
3. Why this combo of consultants and why now?
Listen, we get it. We know many cultural arts organizations are in crisis. They feel absolutely stuck about how to evolve to be relevant to established and new audiences and mitigate the massive changes in their markets.
When you’ve been in your field building expertise over a long period of time, you’re lucky to arrive at that point where you realize all the standard moves just don’t get the job done anymore. Lives don’t change and causes don’t grow unless you get really, really, truthful about your mission.
We knew our skills and insight were the answer to these problems. DRMTM brand design is about total truth and buy-in from the inside out. It’s not an easy journey, but you emerge on the other side a vital, renewed, and relevant representative of your community.
4. What is DRMTM really good at?
Understanding where you are and what keeps you up at night. Holding up a mirror. Dreaming your dream with you. Joining your family. Making your work fun and inspiring again.
We’re really good at pushing organizations to be bold, captivating, and human so you attract the believers who will love and support your work. Our style is painstakingly careful in research, message, design and culture: no BS, never jargon-y, always relatable.
Our goal is to reconnect arts organizations to their higher purpose — why they exist. Refocus their energy on who they serve and how to represent them. Reestablish themselves as catalysts for conversation and change. At the highest level, carve their space as protectors of our humanity through artistic expression. Isn’t that exciting? Arts and culture is powerful! And your brand should be too!
5. What do you do better than other branding firms?
We create brands that are formed out of deep insight, not guesswork. Our careers were made as executives in the cultural field and we bring that expertise to our process. We understand the important distinctions between nonprofit and for-profit branding, and why our sector can often get it wrong.
Our approach to branding is designed to empower organizations to lead with their purpose, not their programs, and adopt the strategic branding tools that build greater capacity across programs and fundraising. Without this shift in our industry we will lose many beloved arts missions.
We also do SERIOUS FUN better than anyone. We all chose to work in arts + culture for the love, wonder, and joy it stoked in our souls. We refuse to go to work if those elements aren’t in the mix.
6. What do you believe is really critical for the current arts + culture community?
We see the social and technological changes of the last several decades calling into question how our arts + cultural institutions should be serving us. Many organizations are in a deep identity crisis. They don’t quite know who they are supposed to be anymore, or how they should be connecting to community. What are their honest motivations and where do they go from here? DRMTM’s branding process offers effective solutions to these questions.
As for what we can actively do ourselves, DRMTM is building two initiatives to address areas we think are crucial in the field right now.
The first is to offer a generous annual grant to one organization that desires the level of our work but doesn’t have the budget to support it. We want to partner with organizations eager to innovate and take risks, but risk is often a nonstarter, especially when budgets are tight.
The second is to offer an annual internship with our team that is reserved for global majority and LGBTQ students or grads because we deeply care about pushing more youthful and diverse talent out into the profession.