The Allen Institute recently completed a sweeping brand overhaul, and its email program needed to reflect that new look. For a three-person marketing team already running a monthly newsletter to 20,000 subscribers and supporting 60 to 70 events per year, rebuilding every email template by hand wasn’t an effective use of the team’s bandwidth. Instead, the Allen Institute brought in Emma’s Professional Services team to help apply the new brand look into their email communications, and came away with a flexible template system they could run on their own.
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“This was our chance to really freshen up the emails, but I didn’t want to lose weeks checking whether every column, width, and margin lined up. Handing that over meant it got done, and done well.”
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
Founded in 2003, the Allen Institute is a nonprofit bioscience research organization in Seattle, home to roughly 950 scientists and staff studying the human brain, our cells, and the immune system at work. Its work is built on open science, so the datasets, tools, models, and even the designs for its custom microscopes are shared freely, and researchers around the world then use those resources to advance their own work. The Institute’s research spans several accelerators, including brain and cell science, neural dynamics, immunology, synthetic biology, and its recently announced Brain Health accelerator, which focuses on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. The Allen Institute is supported primarily by the Fund for Science and Technology, along with funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Before the rebrand, the Allen Institute had already moved on from a cumbersome, manual email setup. Newsletters had been hand-coded in HTML and sent through a clunky legacy platform, making even small changes slow and fragile, and leaving the monthly newsletter to go out on an inconsistent basis. Switching to Emma gave the team a drag-and-drop email builder and a structure that finally felt intuitive, so when the brand overhaul arrived, the only question was how to implement their brand-new look across their email program without losing that ease of use.
The redesign raised a practical problem for the Allen Institute. The new brand identity used a vibrant, wide-ranging color palette, and they wanted to move away from assigning one fixed color to each scientific unit so that each color could be used across any communication. Turning that idea into working email templates meant rethinking layouts, spacing, and figuring out how colors that don’t usually pair could still be cohesive on screen.
The team’s external brand designer delivered polished design packages, but their background was in print and web rather than email, so some concepts didn’t account for how email renders. Someone needed to bridge that gap to email, translating the brand vision into templates that would hold up across inboxes without the marketing team spending weeks on manual adjustments to columns, padding, widths, and everything else email entails.
To handle the redesign, the Allen Institute engaged Emma’s Professional Services team to rebuild its templates for the new brand. The engagement was deliberately lean: the team handed over the designer’s packages along with a short list of the elements and overall feeling it wanted to preserve, and most of the work was settled in just a few calls and emails.
The collaboration was easy from the start. Emma’s Professional Services consultant took the external design packages and translated them into email-ready templates, flagging where a print-oriented idea wouldn’t work well in an inbox and suggesting what would work better in its place. When the marketing team wanted to see how some of the trickier palette combinations would work, it could ask for quick directional examples rather than fully built templates, which kept the process efficient and moving.
Instead of commissioning a long list of separate templates, the team asked for a single master template that included every row type and component the newsletter might need. From that one build, the marketing team created the versions it needed on its own: a layout for the main newsletter, variations for the alumni network and recruiting newsletters, a lighter format for event announcements, and whatever new communication needs pop-up. Because the master template held every component, building each new variation was mostly a matter of rearranging existing pieces instead of starting from a blank canvas, cutting down the time needed to build campaigns.
Emma’s Brand Manager is what lets the Allen Institute team maintain consistency across multiple audiences and lists. They run several subaccounts, one each for its main newsletter, alumni network, partnerships and impact audience, talent and recruiting, and software users, and Brand Manager lets the team store shared templates and components and push them across those subaccounts. When the Allen Institute announced its Brain Health accelerator, the team built one email and sent closely matching versions to several audiences at once, confident the language and look were consistent across the board. If a single color needs to change, it can be updated once and applied to the newsletter template everywhere it appears.
Support has mattered as much as the software for a marketing team of three. Onboarding onto Emma took about six weeks from final decision to first send, helped by an email builder that felt familiar and a setup process that covered how to structure subaccounts and share a subscription center, so subscribers can see every list they belong to in one place. Day to day, the team can email a dedicated support contact and hear back within about a day, which makes a real difference when one or two people are running the entire program alongside every other marketing activity.
The redesign gave the Allen Institute a refreshed email program without the weeks of manual template work the marketing team wanted to avoid. The payoff shows up in the day-to-day: one master template now powers every newsletter and event variation the team sends, each new send starts from a consistent, on-brand foundation, and the vibrant new palette carries cleanly across a newsletter that reaches 20,000 subscribers along with dozens of event emails every year.
Just as important for a small team, the heaviest part of the redesign came off their plate. The team could hand over the specifics and trust that the result would be polished and usable, which freed it to focus on the rest of a demanding, organization-wide rebrand.
With the new templates in place, the Allen Institute is expanding who uses them. The marketing team is onboarding colleagues on the recruiting side to build their own emails within the subaccount structure, and the master template gives them a safe, on-brand starting point. The Professional Services engagement handled the most involved part of the rebrand, and the template system it produced is one the team can keep building on.
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