Grandly is about to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Looking back and recalling what God has done through Grandly makes us excited for the future. I have been profoundly grateful to see so many grandparents expressing newfound hope when they had previously been worrying about what was happening in the lives of their grandchildren. Numerous grandparents have commented, “I didn’t understand my role before, but now I do.” I smile when I hear: “My thinking has changed. I am convinced God hasn’t given up on me or my grandchildren. He has a plan and I am part of it!”
Initially, as I looked at the variety of influencers on youth today, I considered the idea that grandparents could have a great impact on their grandchildren in the area of faith. Then, on February 10, 2016, Pili Galván (now Abouchaar) moved from Xalapa, Mexico to Lansing, Michigan in response to a call to begin a new mission to youth called “The Strategic Grandparents’ Club.” Its goal was to raise up 10,000 youth workers all over the age of 55. All I had started with was an idea: to equip grandparents to pass on their faith to their grandchildren using the principles of youth work. I will leave the story there (to be continued) because today we want to introduce our new logo.
Originally, we had planned to use Facebook and post ideas from youth workers on how grandparents could reach their grandchildren with the gospel. But we quickly realized we needed more and began looking for a website name: strategic-grandparents.org? Nope, too long. Grandparenting.org? Nah, too generic and “grandparenting” was not even in the dictionary then. So grand-what??? Then a word came to mind. It was one of many times this would happen in our history and, in hindsight, I am convinced it was a nudge from the Holy Spirit. It was a word I personally had never used: grandly. I checked the dictionary. Grandly was there. Grandly: adverb, doing something in a grand, magnificent or pompous manner. After rolling it over in my mind for a while, the word evolved into a phrase, “If you are going to do grandparenting, do it grandly.”1 Then I checked whether the website grandly.org was available. Remarkably, it was, and suddenly, we had a simple name and a seven-letter website!
There was only one problem: we weren’t sure we could sell the name to our audience! The word “grandly” didn’t make it into the top 10,000 words in English usage. We needed a logo to do that.
We tried:
It was a grand and pompous “G” but a bit 1970’s psychedelic. It also looked like it said “randly.” We scratched that logo and proceeded to our second attempt.
The icon was fancy and clean, but the logo as a whole was a little too vertical and the circled “g” and the “g” in our font were quite different.
This Spanish iteration got us close but we kept seeing “crandly” not “grandly.”
In April, we had our Eureka moment: a stylish “g” with a hint of an “s” and a “c”. We settled on our iconic “g” and added our tagline.
We used this logo on our Go Fund Me, Facebook, and website pages until 2021, when we settled on our brand colors: indigo blue and apple green. In 2022, we changed our tagline to Strategic Grandparenting.
We asked Jessica Grogan to adapt our logo for our 10th anniversary and we will be using it until November 15, 2026, the 10th anniversary of our first post on www.grandly.org.
Mike Shaughnessy is the founder of Grandly and lives in Maryland.
1 Ultimately, the phrase became the Do It Grandly seminar.