Founded in 1994 as a 501c3, the Dunwoody Preservation Trust (DPT) began as a small purely volunteer organization desperately trying to save two threatened historic buildings. Through the years, it had grown into a group of passionately inspired professionals, both paid and volunteer, committed to using Dunwoody’s history and historic buildings to create the kind of community people want to live in based on the belief that an historic building in the center of town does more for quality of life than another bank or parking lot.
The problem was that the members had come to know this intuitively, but no one had ever articulated it.
The result was that no one really knew what DPT stood for. Over the years, the website had been touched by many people and had become a jumble of confusing statements and graphics, poor grammar, typos and mismatched fonts. The website in no way reflected the “new” DPT.
As a board member – Vice President of Marketing – I accepted as my personal pro-bono quest the task of articulating what DPT truly stood for and using it as the foundation for all of programs, including education, marketing and PR. I wrote the brand story that was in everyone’s heart, totally rewrote the website and revised the logo with the new tagline: Past. Present. Future.
Now everyone knows what DPT stands for: preserving the past, celebrating the present and building the future. We tell this story at all of our touchpoints, including our Camp Flashback, the only kids’ summer history camp in Atlanta, where children experience 19th-Century farm life first hand at our totally renovated 19th-Century farm, the Donaldson-Bannister Farm.
