Making Magic for the Boston Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Youth (BAGLY)

Vision

As it approaches its 50th anniversary, BAGLY sought to define a bold vision for the future and reinvent its brand to better reflect their evolving identity. BAGLY’s new vision needed to capture the dreams and aspirations of an organization that had grown from a group in a church basement to a thriving community serving 200,000 LGBTQ+ youth. It also needed to provide a clear destination, timeframe and measurable impact.

We engaged BAGLY’s leadership team to understand what makes the organization unique and its role int he community. As BAGLY is youth-led, we also held creative workshops with teen leaders to explore their ideas for the future. Playful exercises in this workshop invited participants to use graffiti to express their thoughts on who BAGLY is, and imagining BAGLY as a person or celebrity opened honest and spirited dialogue around its strengths and where is it going.

The discussion led to numerous revelations as each youth leader talked through their choice of symbols, colors, and their overall perspective on what BAGLY means to them and their community. These unique insights coupled with ones from divergent experts on rebellion, heritage, and community helped shape the brand’s ambitions and served as a foundation for its bold vision.

BCG BrightHouse has illuminated the path forward for BAGLY, helping us articulate a vision and identity that empower us to embrace the future with confidence and purpose. This marks an exciting new chapter for BAGLY.

Kurtlan Massarsky
Director of Development & Marketing, BAGLY

Brand Strategy

During our vision discovery process, we identified three main emerging themes for BAGLY: Crafting a Collective Home, A Legacy of Impact, and The Rebel Spirit. These themes became the guiding light for our brand strategy, shaping every decision about how BAGLY’s identity could be expressed visually and emotionally.

To ensure this strategy resonated deeply, we engaged in meaningful conversations with BAGLY’s youth leaders, staff, and stakeholders. Through these discussions, we sought to understand both the message BAGLY wanted to share with the world and the unique needs of it’s audience. What became clear was that BAGLY’s audience could be split into two key groups:

This clarity gave us a strong foundation to explore how BAGLY’s visual identity could bring these themes and insights to life. By combining the emotions tied to its audience with its distinct themes, we set out to craft a brand that balanced warmth and inspiration with boldness and credibility. These notions and nuances helped define the guardrails for social posts, marketing materials, internal communications, and updates to critical tools such as the website.

Branding

While the emerging themes of Crafting a Collective Home, A Legacy of Impact, and The Rebel Spirit guided our creative approach, it became clear that the legacy of impact symbolized by the unicorn was the most important symbol to communicate BAGLY’s identity. This realization solidified during a workshop with BAGLY’s youth community, where a playful “drag-and-drop” exercise with colors and symbols revealed their deep connection to the unicorn. For BAGLY’s youth, the unicorn wasn’t just a visual element—it embodied their quirks, their individuality, and their sense of being unique and rare in the best way possible.

Inspired by this, we reimagined the unicorn to honor BAGLY’s rich history while aligning it with its bold future and then incorporated it along with elements of Home and Rebellion into the overall brand design.

Home
The unicorn’s curves and colors subtly form the shape of a flame, symbolizing BAGLY’s central fire—the heart of its safe and supportive space for LGBTQ+ youth. The unicorn’s horn, with its upward gradient and forward direction, acts as a subtle nod to BAGLY’s vision—an Easter egg for those looking closely. It symbolizes aspiration, progress, and the organization’s role as a guiding light for LGBTQ+ youth.

Rebellion
To celebrate BAGLY’s bold spirit, we created dynamic applications like tattoo-inspired designs, protest banners, and a ready-to-cut graffiti stencil—offering youth tools for creative expression and activism.

The final brand design ties it all together—the reimagined unicorn, the brand’s vibrant color palette and versatile applications—and ensures that BAGLY remains both welcoming and bold. A true reflection of the community it serves.

Website

Workshops with BAGLY’s youth leaders also shaped the redesign of the website, highlighting the need to simplify navigation, drive donations, and improve access to resources for LGBTQ+ youth. BCG X translated these insights into streamlined wireframes that ensured an intuitive and enjoyable user experience.

To align with BAGLY’s refreshed brand, the website incorporated the new logo, typography, and colors while introducing dynamic shapes and interactions inspired by the unicorn’s flowing design. A consistent photography style was defined, blending existing materials with a vision for future visuals that are colorful, brave, and positive.

The result is a website that feels authentic to BAGLY’s identity—a functional and inspiring platform that supports the community it serves and strengthens its connection with donors.