Today the Foundation begins transitioning to a refreshed logo design for MJFF and Team Fox – the first logo refresh in our history. You’ll notice an updated font, simplified color scheme and a few tweaks to our beloved fox, who takes a more prominent position in both logos. But beyond these superficial changes, what do our new logos say about who we are in 2012?

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research launched in 2000 with a bold plan to create a new model for speeding research progress. More than 10 years into our work, we’ve built that model and we are seeing more indications every day that it’s working. But as problem solvers, we always look ahead to the next challenge on the horizon. For the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that the next big challenge for our problem-solving is to devise practical and effective ways to motivate the PD community to get involved in our work to speed a cure — whether by participating in clinical research, supporting Team Fox, joining us at regional events or on social networks, or being part of our $50-million Brin Wojcicki Challenge. Today, while our mission remains exclusively to speed research progress, we are increasingly a portal to engagement for the PD community at large — not just researchers but patients, their loved ones, physicians and members of the general public who are inspired to give back.

Our new Foundation logo is representative of this vision of our work. The layout of our Foundation name now emphasizes “For Parkinson’s Research” — but  as part of a full statement that reflects the concept of the collective. No single word has more prominence than another. The orange color is vibrant, bold and energetic. Our mascot retains his conceptual quality and continues to speak to the speed, resourcefulness and efficiency we strive to bring to our work to advance a cure — yet he has been subtly tweaked to be more easily recognizable as a fox, with two ears and a bushy tail. On the Team Fox side, our fox takes a more prominent role. This is one step toward building additional recognition and equity for our beloved fox in order to solidly establish his connection to our Foundation and better differentiate the Team Fox brand from other entities with Fox in their names.

Naturally, conversations about our logo can only happen in the context of defining and solidifying our overall brand identity. Here are the tenets of our brand, which we strive to deliver on every day:

We are risk-takers and problem-solvers.

• From inception, MJFF has invested in high-risk, high-reward research targets; an approach that in 10 short years has transformed the broader approach in the PD research field.

Our model is different.

• It is accepted practice among private disease research funders that the most important decisions — how to allocate donor-raised dollars — are made by external scientific advisors and boards. We bucked this model from day one in favor of building an in-house team of formally trained PhDs and business-trained project managers. This team allows us to continually formulate and refine an informed and independent point of view on research priorities that is unlike any other player in the space.

We have the same measure of success as patients.

• MJFF champions solutions that will improve the lives of patients because our measure of success is always the same as theirs: improved treatments and a cure for Parkinson’s, regardless of financial ROI.

We are obsessed with efficiency.

• 87 cents of every dollar donated goes straight to research, in total, $289 million to research — making MJFF the largest private funder of PD research in the world.

We are turning the way the PD community engages in the quest for a cure upside down.

MJFF creates platforms for PD patients and their loved ones to find peer-to-peer support and meaningfully engage in the quest for cures at critical tipping points in the development pipeline.

• With over 1,500 active members across all 50 states, our grassroots network of Team Fox community fundraisers has raised over $15 million since 2006.
• Fox Trial Finder, a Web 2.0 smart-match tool to connect the PD community with clinical trials that urgently need them, is online in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, with 5,300 volunteers signed up to date.
• Major donors have taken notice of our work, including Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google) and Anne Wojcicki (co-founder of 23andMe) who have given over $100M to the Foundation since 2004 and are currently sponsoring a $50-million challenge to match donor dollars through Dec. 31, 2012.

We are impatient on behalf of patients.

• Everything we do is with patients in mind, at all stages of PD, which informs our investments in disease-modifying therapies, better symptomatic treatments and new approaches to the symptoms entirely unaddressed by today’s generation of drugs.