The opportunity
Mahomet, Illinois sits in the middle of the country at the middle of an inflection point. The Mahomet Area Chamber of Commerce (MACC) is a non-profit serving roughly 200 local businesses with networking, community events, promotional campaigns, and educational resources. Over the last two years, the organization restructured. By the time we picked up the brief, they were ready to expand membership and broaden the benefits offered to existing members.
What they needed: an outside team to do the internal brand audit they couldn't easily do for themselves, and to translate the audit into something tangible the organization could use right away.
The brief came to us through SCAD Serve, a community-serving studio that pairs SCAD design teams with non-profits. Our sponsor at MACC was Lauren Hays, the Chamber's Project Coordinator (and a 2025 SCAD MFA in Luxury & Brand Management graduate, so the brief was sharper than most).
The problem
A 200-business Chamber in a small town faces three brand problems at once:
- Recognition, recruit new member businesses without a marketing budget that can compete with national chambers
- Retention, give existing members a reason to keep paying dues that's more concrete than networking
- Reach, activate the residents within a 30-mile radius to actually Shop Mahomet, so members feel the business uplift
MACC's existing brand and digital presence had been stitched together piece by piece over years. Two websites (mahometchamberofcommerce.com and visitmahomet.com), no system holding them together, branded materials that didn't quite signal what the Chamber stood for. The audit needed to surface what was actually working, what was getting in the way, and what a coherent next step looked like.
The approach
The brief gave us three possible deliverable shapes, and asked us to recommend which combination would serve the organization best:
- Shop Mahomet campaign, a specific small-business promotion targeting the 30-mile-radius residents
- Brand refresh, updated guidelines + a proposed set of branded materials Chamber members can use
- Web redesign, a co-branded solution for both Chamber-owned websites
Our 10-week SCAD Serve studio worked through stakeholder interviews, an internal brand audit, market context, and a strategy synthesis that proposed a layered solution: foundation work first, then campaign-and-materials, then a phased web redesign. The full work landed in a Foundation Document delivered to MACC at the end of the quarter.
What we delivered
By the end of summer 2025, MACC received:
- A stakeholder audit with insights from Chamber leadership, member businesses, and prospective members
- A brand audit of MACC's current identity, materials, and digital footprint, with strengths and gaps named
- A strategic recommendation sequencing the campaign, brand refresh, and web redesign in order of leverage
- A Foundation Document with the audit, strategy, proposed solutions, and a phased roadmap the Chamber can execute against
- A final pitch presentation to the sponsor and Chamber leadership