Celebrating a major milestone with an anniversary campaign: An interview with The Phi Beta Kappa Society

Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s premier academic honor society, traces its founding to December 1776. Since then, Phi Beta Kappa has championed the value of the arts and sciences in education and in public life. Generations of members have taken the Phi Beta Kappa motto—“A love of learning is the guide of life”—to heart.

To mark the society’s 250th anniversary, Phi Beta Kappa planned an 18-month celebration.

Big Duck collaborated with Phi Beta Kappa’s national office to distill the organization’s brand strategy, create a concept, map out a plan, and bring the campaign to life through printed pieces, social media, a dedicated landing page, videos, and merchandise. 

I spoke with Mackenzie Galloway-Cole, Phi Beta Kappa’s Director of Communications and Digital Strategy, to learn more about meeting the moment while honoring the past.

In almost 250 years, the Phi Beta Kappa Society has had just one official “logo”. Now, Big Duck has developed a new campaign logo and theme (“Where knowledge inspires action”). Why was it important that Phi Beta Kappa go all out with a big campaign at this particular moment?

For us, it has always been about meeting the moment. We have approached milestone anniversaries in different ways throughout our history. The 200th anniversary was marked by the creation of a full book about the history of the organization, which now lives as a real record we often go back to when looking for answers. That made sense then, but that approach doesn’t make sense given the context around our work and the landscape of higher education today. New branding is not just about an occasion; it has to have a reason driving the decisions.

Our reason today is that arts and sciences education, the core of our mission, is under real pressure right now, from funding cuts, changes in public opinion and trust, and questions about the value of this type of education. Phi Beta Kappa was founded by students 250 years ago as a place to have important conversations and exchange ideas during turbulent times for the country. In the 250 years since, our members have used their arts and sciences education to ask the big questions that contribute to advancements in every corner of American life. The moment today calls for us to uphold that spirit.

“Where knowledge inspires action” emerged from this. It is deliberately present tense. Our members did not stop being curious the day they received their key, and they did not stop using their knowledge to make change when they stepped off their campuses. We wanted a line that points at what our members, including some of our country’s greatest innovators, thinkers, and changemakers, do with an arts and sciences education now, and not just something that asks people to look back nostalgically at our founding. We wanted to be rooted in 250 years of history, but use that to propel the organization into the future.

What has been the biggest challenge in creating this campaign?

The biggest challenge is at the core of all our organizational communications: a single identity has to work in many different rooms and with many different audiences.

The 250th has to land with a 21-year-old college senior who just received an invitation to join the organization, a member inducted in 1974 who counts on their local association for social events rooted in lifelong learning, a chapter officer planning a campus event, a donor weighing a gift, and a reporter who has never thought about us. Those audiences want different things from us. The challenge was resisting the urge to build five versions of the campaign and instead building one flexible enough to stretch without fragmenting.

What has resonated most with your members and alumni as you introduce the campaign?

The word “action” has really been fun to test and implement with our audiences.

Phi Beta Kappa is an honor society, and honor societies have a built-in pull toward the past. Members were recognized for something they did as an undergraduate, sometimes fifty years ago or more. And for some of our members, that was the last time they thought about us. That might be all they think we do. That is what we want to change.

In talking with some of our chapter and association volunteers, the idea of Phi Beta Kappa as a place of “action” has been an exciting framework for discussion. Our audiences know that their arts and sciences education did not stop having an impact on their lives when they stepped off campus, but sometimes it can be hard to explain how exactly that shows up. “Where knowledge inspires action” gave them permission to talk about membership in the present tense.

The clearest signal has been in the excitement and engagement from these volunteers. They have been so eager to use the toolkits we put together with the Big Duck team, which provide them with ways to bring the 250th into programs they had already scheduled and inspire new ideas.

How has the campaign development process been for your team? Did anything surprise you?

The thing I have heard most from my team after each round of collaboration is “I didn’t realize this would be so fun!”

My team expected long, dry debates about color and typography—serif versus sans serif. What actually consumed the time was having important discussions that are core to our work and core to the 250th anniversary: who is this campaign for, what does success look like for the campaign, how do we want people to feel, what do we want people to do after they engage with the campaign.

We got to have conversations where we dreamed big, and then the Big Duck team of creatives translated those dreams into exciting visuals and engaging messaging options for us to react to and refine. It was an energizing collaboration process.

The campaign wraps in the summer of 2027—are you planning to carry any elements forward or will you phase out the campaign branding completely?

The 250th mark itself is time-stamped, and the special 250 mark should retire when the anniversary does. But the “250 logo” was never the most valuable part. What we are really building is a refreshed infrastructure underneath: a fresh voice, a new dynamic visual system, compelling messaging guidelines. None of that work expires in August 2027.

In some ways, we are treating the campaign as beta testing for a real rebrand. Walking into a 250-year-old institution and proposing radical changes to its brand would have been a much harder sell, and correctly so. An anniversary campaign is a place to “test” what a modern Phi Beta Kappa sounds like, with a built-in end date if any elements do not work. Much of what we are doing is working. The question we carry into 2027 is not whether to keep any of this branding work, but asking which parts have earned a permanent place in the brand infrastructure. 

And I am excited to see where that next phase of work takes the organization in 2027 and beyond.