We partner with changemakers to help engineer meaningful impact.

Very few, if any, creative firms in the region can match Mighty Engine’s depth and range of experience promoting Greater Philadelphia’s tourism assets and cultural institutions to audiences both local and global.

Over the years, we’ve partnered with major nonprofit and public agencies dedicated to positioning Philadelphia as a destination to visit, live, and invest in.

‍We were the Pennsylvania Convention & Visitors Bureau’s agency-of-record for nearly a decade, which encompassed the successful relaunch of the Pennsylvania Convention Center after a major expansion and supporting each of their Congresses on their specialized projects, such as promoting international visitation and spearheading Philadelphia’s Olympic bid submission.

‍We have also worked closely with Visit Philadelphia, the Independence Visitor Center and the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia to support their regional marketing efforts.

‍Across all these national tourism and convention promotion campaigns, we help partners clarify what makes Philadelphia distinctive, translating that story into compelling creative assets, driving measurable engagement and sizable increases in visits and conventions.

‍This included leading Visit Philadelphia’s ecotourism market study—THINK OUTSIDE—which helped secure an unprecedented $1 million in funds to promote our region’s eco-assets.

Mighty Engine first partnered with the City’s Managing Director’s Office in 2006 when the Philadelphia Marathon was ready to stand taller in a crowded field of regional and national rivals. The goal was clear: boost the brand, sharpen the marketing strategy and raise the marathon’s profile so more runners would choose Philadelphia, not just for the course, but for the whole experience—all to support community economic development.

‍We began by developing a new logo based on both the God of Speed’s iconic winged foot and the similarly-shaped the Schuylkill River—a brand that continues to energize the marathon twenty years later.

Over seven consecutive years, we also helped shape the messaging around what made this race different, highlighting the fast-paced course while simultaneously promoting Philadelphia as a welcoming, family-friendly destination with the tagline: “The best time of your life.”

‍Other messaging that emerged as favorites among marathoners and spectators alike, solidifying the brand, included: Kick Asphalt, Redefine Possible and Push Through.

The Philadelphia Marathon surpassed registration goals, growing from less than 10,000 to its course capacity of nearly 30,000, attracting elite runners as well as first-time marathoners. We also helped the city secure several title sponsors, supporting revenue-generating strategies that strengthened the event’s sustained growth.

‍By 2013, the Philadelphia Marathon was reaching capacity earlier than ever, drawing more than 60,000 spectators and generating an economic impact of more than $20 million for the city.

And the momentum continued. By 2025, participation had climbed even higher, with 37,000 runners taking part in Philadelphia Marathon Weekend and both the half and full marathons selling out months before race weekend.

‍Nearly 20 years after Mighty Engine helped reposition the Philadelphia Marathon, the event continues to deliver on the promise at the heart of that original brand strategy: a world-class race that is unmistakably Philadelphia.

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The United Negro College Fund is the nation’s oldest and biggest advocate of Black higher education.

‍We are honored to work with the UNCF’s Institute for Capacity Building to further the outsized impact of the nation’s 102 Historically Black Colleges and Universities and 64 Primarily Black Institutions.

‍From assisting with program design to developing a new website and preparing fundraising pitches, we’ve become a trusted partner in propelling student success, community advancement and the fight for racial-justice equity despite historic and ongoing underfunding and marginalization of Black colleges and universities.

‍We’ve led intensive media tours, providing compelling photography, interview and campus footage of more than 20 Black colleges and universities. We’ve also played an instrumental role in growing and amplifying their annual gathering of Black higher education. After we helped rebrand this conference to UNITE, both attendance and sponsorship more than tripled.

‍UNCF has also tapped us for many other projects, including supporting the strategic communications of the HBCU Transformation Project funded by Blue Meridian Partners and the promotion of Target Scholars. We’ve also helped prepare several pitches, including the one for HBCUv (an innovative virtual learning platform that brings the best of Black higher education online), as well as reports, including the latest on the mental health of Black college students.

Mighty Engine is a leader in helping clients develop, execute and promote public outreach and engagement campaigns designed to support the academic promise of all children and every family’s desire for an equal shot at life success.

‍Throughout our work in education, we’ve always prioritized hearing from, honoring and respecting family and student voices, reinforcing  their testimonials and stories with compelling statistics based on evidence-based research.

‍Just a few of the major projects we’ve worked on in this area:

• As the lead creative strategy consultant for the Read by 4th coalition—the nation’s most comprehensive early literacy effort—we’ve worked on a series of campaigns focused on delivering—in simple, easily-digested ways—everyday playful family activities that can spur on reading interest and confidence among young children.

• We were the lead agency and prime architects of the Come Aboard the Reading Promise campaign, which focused on creating family-focused messaging designed specifically to be placed throughout Philadelphia’s public transit system to encourage the kinds of adult-child interactions and conversations that have been shown to support early literacy.

• The success of this work led the William Penn Foundation to ask us to shepherd a community design process that led to Right2ReadPhilly—an early-literacy campaign that reached more than 100,000 families during its summer 2024 pilot.

• With Sara Novic, a best-selling novelist and an instructor in deaf studies, we developed Simple Signs, First Words in American Sign Language. Confirming our hunches of the benefits of Simple Signs, the American Academy of Pediatrics now promotes early exposure to sign language as a means to improve development for all children.

• With Sharif El-Mekki, the CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, we brought back the Freedom Schools Alphabet Song based in Black pedagogy. Just in time as the Philly schools make a historic shift back to the science-of-reading, phonics-based teaching approach.

• For the Book Trust (a national early-literacy nonprofit spreading the joy of reading by increasing book access, choice and ownership for thousands of students), we created a short, animated video that memorably conveyed their mission and impact.

• We also helped the Literacy Design Collaborative, a New York-based national educational organization which grew out of the Gates Foundation’s national education reform efforts, to rethink and re-energize their organizational branding and messaging as they shift their program delivery model.

We have worked extensively with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health on a series of successful public education campaigns: encouraging 30 minutes of joyful movement into everyday routines; promoting smoking cessation; designing developmentally-appropriate early-literacy products; creating compelling violence-prevention messaging with and for young people; and spotlighting neighborhood produce trucks.

‍For the smoke cessation If I Can Quit, So Can You Campaign, we feature real Philadelphians from “high-risk” groups (those in recovery, pregnant women and young moms, frontline workers, LGBTQIA+, Latinos and veterans) who share their quit story.

‍To encourage more physical activity, through Philly Powered, we presented stories of fellow Philadelphians who overcame a wide range of fitness challenges to show how fitness can be accessible to all, regardless of age, income or body type. The campaign’s website was the most visited health-related city site, earning multiple awards.

‍Philly Loves Fresh features seven produce trucks in West and Southwest Philly, encouraging residents to stop by for fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices. Each product truck owner saw sizable increases in business during our campaign.

For nearly a decade, we have served as the strategic communications partner of the Center for Black Educator Development whose mission is to rebuild the national Black teacher pipeline so that our nation’s corps of educators reflects the diversity of our nation’s students, better positioning all students to achieve in school.

‍From creating branding assets and overseeing the directing and production of multimedia to developing annual reports, fundraising materials and editorial contributions and promoting the youth-driven #WeNeedBlackTeachers campaign, Mighty Engine has been there from the beginning.

‍During BMEC2024, it was especially moving to see young people we first met as high schoolers now take the stage as teachers, living up to what it means when CBED’s founder and CEO Sharif El-Mekki says, “The purest form of activism is teaching Black children superbly well.”

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We are the creative agency behind this novel trauma-healing campaign, developed in partnership with Dr. Ted Corbin and MacArthur Foundation genius grantee Dr. John Rich (both former founders of Drexel University’s Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice), and a coalition of young survivors and witnesses of violence  and community activists.

‍From the beginning, the goal was to see how we could leverage strategic communications—from branding and digital platforms to social media and community events—to promote trauma healing and educate the public about its importance in reducing violence, retaliation and re-injury among our youth.

It was clear from the beginning that meant we had to transform the conversation about violence away from one that is based in personal shaming toward one that is based in healing.

‍The focus of the campaign that emerged from this process was to promote the idea that healing from trauma—including from crime and violence—is possible by voicing messages of hope and healing in the victims of trauma. Their collective healing stories encourage more healing and, in doing so, blur the lines between healer and healed, also exponentially increasing the ways one can heal from trauma.

‍We are now working with partners in Atlanta and Chicago to bring the campaign to other high-need urban areas, while keeping each community’s unique focus.

The homeownership gap between Black and white Philadelphians persists, according to recent research by both the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Zillow.

‍Their findings suggest this gap is the result of systemic roadblocks that go beyond income. For example, lenders tend to deny more Black applicants seeking mortgage loans, and Black families tend to have less access to generational wealth—mainly due to the persistent racial homeownership gap.

‍To confront this confounding issue, a coalition of organizations including the Urban League of Philadelphia, HACE, New Kensington CDC, Congreso de Latinos Unidos and the Urban Affairs Coalition came together to form Philly5000, with support from Wells Fargo.

‍Working with new Philly homeowners and housing counselors, Mighty Engine develop branding, a website and social-media content for Philly5000 that welcomed and encouraged lower-income Black and Brown families to homeownership, providing them with the information they need to assess their readiness for homeownership and to connect them to special programs, deals and a neighborhood housing counselor.

As a result of our work, Philly5000 was able to meet their recruitment goals.

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In Southeast Asia, men attend college at nearly three times the rate of women even as international experts prioritize supporting women through higher education and entrepreneurship as proven means to socio-economic development.

‍Harpswell, U.S.-based nonprofit, sees promoting the next generation of women leaders as the most powerful force for positive social change in Southeast Asia and key to the region’s future

‍They operate two first-of-their-kind residential leadership centers for young women attending university in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as well as a two-week leadership training summit in Malaysia for young professional women from the ten ASEAN countries across Southeast Asia and Nepal.

‍The majority of the young women in their programs report graduating at the top-ten percent of their university class and two-thirds receiving competitive scholarships.

‍We helped them develop a comprehensive new brand that better reflects the organization and the women they serve, applying these concepts and messaging to the creation of new materials and their website. They’ve been able to use the new assets to secure more partners and sponsors.

‍Harpswell was founded by Alan Lightman, an American writer, scientist and social entrepreneur.

Professor Lightman has made fundamental contributions to the field of astrophysics, and is best known for authoring Einstein’s Dreams and holding faculty appointments in both science and the humanities at MIT.

With a new leader at the helm in 2021, United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey asked Mighty Engine to support a rebranding and website-development effort that would reflect their shift in strategic focus to prioritize poverty-fighting efforts and related programming.

‍This renewed focus came as Philadelphia was recognized (and is still recognized) as the nation’s poorest big city, with a poverty rate that hovers around a quarter of the population.

‍Our responsibilities also included working closely with United Way program staff to develop and present a new messaging plan focused on ending intergenerational poverty.

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