New client: Edovo asks Buena to rebrand education behind bars
Edovo puts free courses on prison tablets for about a million people, with a startup’s brand. It asked us for the whole stack: strategy, design, language and a website.
For twelve years Edovo has put free courses on the tablets inside America’s prisons and jails, quietly reaching close to a million people. This month it steps out with a new brand and a new edovo.org from Buena, built around a single idea: everyone who touches Edovo, from a learner in a cell to a donor at a kitchen table, makes ripples.
A teacher with 20 students in a prison of 4,000
Edovo starts with a father. When Brian Hill was growing up, his dad taught at Folsom prison in California, where he had 20 students in a facility holding 4,000 people.1 The arithmetic stuck. In 2012, a year into a job in education at Northwestern, Hill left to build something that could reach the other 3,980.1
That something became Edovo: courses, job training, reading and rehabilitation programs delivered on the secure tablets many facilities already use. The learning is free to the learner and free to the prison, because donors cover the cost. Before Edovo, only about one in five incarcerated people had access to education or rehabilitation programs.1 By 2024 Edovo was in about half the prisons in the country, and about a million people could log in.2
I just had this realization that if I don’t jump in, I don’t think anyone will.
Edovo, as the rebrand launched
- 1Mincarcerated people with access to free learningPeople in prisons and jails who can open Edovo’s courses on a tablet.
- 50M+hours spent learning on the platformTotal time learners have spent in Edovo courses since 2012.
- 300+content partnersUniversities, nonprofits and publishers whose courses run on Edovo.
- 35,000hours of content approved for correctionsCourse material cleared for use inside correctional facilities.
A startup’s look, a nonprofit’s mission
By 2024 Edovo had become a nonprofit, and its brand hadn’t caught up. It still looked like the tech startup it once was, and almost nobody outside corrections knew its story.
The harder problem was the audience. Edovo has to speak to an unusually wide circle of people at once: learners and their families, wardens and directors of corrections, patrol officers, the universities and nonprofits that supply its courses, donors, advocates, and a public that rarely thinks about education behind bars. Each group had heard a different version of Edovo. None of them had a single picture of it.
In May 2024 Edovo asked Buena for the whole stack: brand strategy, design, language and a new website. We started where we always do, by looking for the one thing every one of those people had in common.
Everyone around Edovo makes ripples
We found it in water. Something went wrong, often many things, before a person ended up in prison. Edovo is the drop in the pond that starts a ripple going the other way.
And it isn’t only the learner who makes ripples. The officer who hands out tablets does. So does the content partner who writes a parenting course, the mother who asks her son what he learned this week, the donor, the person who shares a post. The idea turned a list of stakeholders into one community with one job.
Edovo is the drop in the pond that starts a ripple for good.
The ripple became the brand. It rings the new “e” logo. It runs as fine wavy lines behind every layout, from a slide to a T-shirt. And it became an invitation to everyone involved: Be a ripple maker.
Headlines with an edge
Corrections is a careful field, and Edovo has to work inside it. But a brand that whispers gets ignored. So we wrote lines that are warm, a little wry, and impossible to scroll past.
A mind is a terrible thing to jail. From cell to school. Spare change makes big change. Change one, change many. Each one says something true about the work in five words or fewer, and each pairs with a close-up portrait set against the ripple lines and a bright, almost minty green.
One family, from the cell block to life after release
Edovo had grown into several products with several looks. We brought them into one family, each with the same rippled “e” and its own color.
Edovo Learn
The app incarcerated learners use for courses, reading and job training.
Edovo Insight
The app that lets corrections staff manage and support learners.
Edovo Editor
The tool content partners use to build courses for people inside.
The fourth, Edovo Go, carries learning past the prison gate, for people who have come home.3 Four apps, four colors, one name. A warden, a learner and a donor now see the same Edovo.
A new edovo.org
Then we built the site to carry it all. The new edovo.org opens on the line that sums up the brand, A mind is a terrible thing to jail, followed by Edovo’s promise of free rehabilitation, upskilling and education for every incarcerated person in America.3 From there it speaks to each audience in turn: learners and families, corrections staff, content partners, and the donors who keep the whole thing free.
Buena designed and built it in Webflow, so Edovo’s team can update stories, news and courses on its own, and wrote the brand book behind it: mission, personality, logo, type, color, photography and a copy bible for how Edovo sounds.
How the rebrand came together
2012
Edovo begins
Brian Hill leaves Northwestern to bring education to people in prison.
May 2024
Buena joins
Edovo asks Buena for brand strategy, design, language and a new website.
Summer 2024
The ripple
The idea, the logo, the headlines and the product family take shape.
November 2024
Launch
The new edovo.org goes live with the new brand.
A brand doesn’t teach anyone to read or pass a GED. What it can do is make the case clearly enough that more people say yes: more states, more facilities, more donors. That is the ripple Edovo is after, and now it has a look and a voice to match.
