Eagles creative team helps Philly nonprofits soar

Sean Flanagan designed animated GIF awards for kids in the Trippley Foundation’s academic and athletic programs in Chester.

Loraine Griffiths created a new logo for the Hammonton, N.J., Early Childhood Education Center.

And Christine Dorn helped the Phoenixville Area Time Bank produce an annual report about how the mom-and-pop organization overcame challenges during the first year of the pandemic.

In 2021, Flanagan, Griffiths, Dorn, and a fourth member of the Philadelphia Eagles creative team volunteered their design expertise and technical assistance, free of charge, to 13 small- and medium-size nonprofits in the Philadelphia region. The team also worked with a housing agency in Virginia, and it may expand service even further outside the area this year.

“A lot of nonprofits have a small number of employees wearing a lot of hats,” said Flanagan, the director of the creative team. Together, he and graphic artists Dorn, Griffiths, and Matthew Schwenk provided 200 hours of service valued at $52,000 to recipient organizations last year.

Even established nonprofits with respected track records often don’t have staff overseeing social media accounts, annual reports, and promotional materials. All such media are key to effective messaging, as well as fund-raising, said Flanagan.

“We told the nonprofits, ‘You don’t have to worry about finding the talent. We’re taking this off your plate,’” he said.

The pro bono services comprised about 10% of the creative team’s workload, and members said they were able to accomplish a good deal of the work for the nonprofits during the Eagles off-season.

Their effort was inspired by an internal email sent by the Eagles community relations team in December 2020 that included a link to the Key Skills Hub of the Philadelphia Foundation. The skills hub utilizes the Catchafire platform to connect volunteers and nonprofits.

“We cover the costs for the platform, so everything is free to the nonprofits,” said Ted Qualli, the foundation’s director of marketing and communications. The foundation also manages more than 600 charitable funds, including the Lenfest Institute, which owns The Inquirer.

Providing nonprofits with access to skilled professionals at no cost enables the foundation “to get a much larger return on an investment, and impact more organizations,” Qualli said.

Heather Finnegan is president of The Community’s Foundation, a Delaware County nonprofit that assists local organizations and projects. Recently, these have included a family’s effort to raise money to build an all-access playground in the Ridley school district, and another family’s project to redistribute gently used books to underserved students.

The Eagles creatives got right down to business with TCF, said Finnegan.

“They would get on a call, brainstorm with us for 20 minutes, and provide high-quality materials we couldn’t make on our own,” she said.

Working with Griffiths (”she was fabulous,” said Finnegan) yielded a new logo for the organization, which is centered in Chester.

“We knew how wanted people to feel. We wanted the logo to show that it’s a strong community, with great assets,” said Finnegan. The result “was professional and high-quality, and Lorraine provided multiple formats to allow us to utilize the logo across different communication channels.”

The Garces Foundation, headquartered in South Philly, assists Spanish-speaking immigrant communities with food, English classes, and access to medical and dental services. “Over and over people tell us, ‘I didn’t know about you,’” executive director Robin Morris said.

To better publicize and promote the foundation’s work, the Eagles design team “built us a new website that takes our information and presents it in a digestible way,” said Morris.

“We’re so little we don’t have the [staff] to do that. They also put the information we gather and put it on a dashboard, which is incredibly helpful in getting grants,” she said. “And we have almost 2,000 people on our Instagram account, which is really important for reaching younger people.”

David A. Brown is president of the Trippley Foundation. It’s named for his friend Will Trippley, a star athlete and popular Shipley School student who was gunned down in Chester in 2004.

The foundation was established by Trippley’s mother to honor her son’s memory by providing young people with opportunities to excel on the soccer field and in the classroom.

“When Sean Flanagan called and said he was director of the Eagles creative team, I thought, ‘Is this real life?’” said Brown. “It was an opportunity for us to have a GIF badge — for students who complete our courses — created by one of the best in the business.

”Sean went out of his way to be supportive,” Brown said. “He was super-professional, and for me the experience was that the Trippley Foundation is in the game now.”