De Dierenbescherming
culture
strategy
May 2024
Story: Dierenbescherming
When love for animals takes many forms, one shared story can make a movement feel like a family. Together with De Dierenbescherming, we helped unify 400 employees and 4,000 volunteers across sixty locations with a clear cultural heartbeat and a language people could live.
Dierenbescherming
Picture a volunteer lifting a frightened animal into an ambulance on a rainy Tuesday evening. Then picture a lobbyist in The Hague pacing a hallway waiting to speak to a minister. Same love for animals, different clothes, different vocabulary, different postcode. After years of merging local chapters, De Dierenbescherming faced a very recognisable question: did all 4,400 of them feel part of the same story?
400 employees. 4,000 volunteers. Sixty locations. You can't issue a memo across an organisation that shape and expect culture to arrive with it. You have to find the heartbeat that's already there, and give it a language.
Listening across sixty doorsteps
Rather than writing a brand from a boardroom, we went looking for the one that was already in the building, or in the shelter, or in the car on the way to a call-out. Through BR-ND Kitchen sessions and 23plusone dialogues we gathered employees, volunteers and partners into the same rooms, across hierarchy, across region.
With 23plusone we tested which of the 24 fundamental human drivers were already most alive in how people across the organisation talked about their work. Care and compassion, obviously. But also responsibility, justice and belonging: the drivers that keep people showing up and fighting on a bad week. That signal was stable across shelter, street and The Hague.
"The sessions with BR-ND People helped us look beyond hierarchy and find the universal driver that connects us all: being the voice for those who cannot speak for themselves." De Dierenbescherming participant
A language people can actually live
Out of that came a shared brand and culture language, not a poster set. A handbook built to be used in hiring conversations, in volunteer inductions, and in the small daily choices that add up to culture. A compass that holds up from Limburg to The Hague, from night-shift shelter worker to director.
See the culture & behaviour handbook on Issuu
Holding one culture across many locations?
If your organisation is stitching together merged chapters, spread across many sites, or carried by a big mix of paid staff and volunteers, this is recognisable ground. Let's talk about finding the shared heartbeat underneath the organogram and giving it a language your people can actually live.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar