New client: Edovo asks Buena to rebrand education behind bars

Edovo has spent twelve years putting free education on the tablets inside America’s prisons and jails. This month it asked Buena for the whole stack: brand strategy, design, language and a new website. It’s the start of a partnership that would go on to make a new brand, a national day of action and a hoodie priced at $8,094.

A teacher with 20 students in a prison of 4,000

Edovo’s founder, Brian Hill, grew up with a father who taught at Folsom prison, where he had 20 students in a facility holding 4,000 people. In 2012 Hill set out to reach the rest. Edovo delivers courses, job training, reading and rehabilitation programs on the secure tablets many facilities already use, free to the learner and free to the prison, because donors cover the cost.

A nonprofit’s mission in a startup’s clothes

Edovo has become a nonprofit, and its brand hasn’t caught up. It still looks like the tech startup it once was, and few people outside corrections know its story.

The harder problem is the audience. Edovo has to speak to an unusually wide circle at once, and each group has heard a different version of it.

• Learners and families

  The people inside who use the courses, and the families waiting for them at home.

• Corrections

  Wardens, directors and the officers who hand out the tablets.

• Partners and donors

  The universities and nonprofits that supply courses, and the donors who keep them free.

Our job is to find the one thing all of those people have in common, and build the brand on it.

What came next

We found it in water. Edovo is the drop in the pond that starts a ripple for good, and everyone around it makes ripples too. That idea became a new logo, a bright green identity, headlines with an edge and a new edovo.org, launched in November 2024. Read the story in Edovo’s new brand and the case in Edovo.

Edovo is the drop in the pond that starts a ripple for good.

The partnership kept going. In March 2025 we turned the 🔓 emoji into a donation for Unlock Day, which drew 5.8 million emojis and reached 53 million people (the results). Alongside it came Unlock gear, clothes priced in locks, made with artist Halim Flowers (the story).

It starts with a question we ask every new client: what does everyone around you share? For Edovo, the answer turned out to be a ripple.