Centre for Systems Practice | VIVA Social Communications

How VIVA Is Building the Brand, Voice, and Knowledge Base of the Centre for Systems Practice

Centre for Systems Practice (CSP) is a SELCO Foundation initiative. VIVA has been its communications, design, and strategy partner since launch.

Client

Centre for Systems Practice (CSP), a SELCO Foundation initiative

Focus

Systems-practice capacity-building across India’s development ecosystem

Partnership

Ongoing since CSP’s launch in October 2025

Scope

Brand & visual identity · Narrative & content strategy · Website · Residency documentation & comms support · Five partner-organisation case studies

Context

SELCO Foundation has spent decades working at the intersection of decentralised energy access, livelihoods, climate resilience, and institutional capacity-building, moving over time from being seen as an “energy solutions” organisation to a systems-oriented one. The Centre for Systems Practice (CSP) is the next chapter of that evolution: a platform built to surface, strengthen, and connect the field-rooted systems practice already happening across India’s development sector, work that usually stays fragmented, undocumented, and unsupported.

CSP is built on three pillars: SPx Lab (capacity building), Knowledge (documenting and sharing field intelligence), and Network (building a collaborative ecosystem of partner organisations). SPx Lab is home to CSP’s flagship programme, the Systems Practice Fellowship: a year-long, field-rooted journey for practitioners working on complex, systemic problems in their own communities.

VIVA Social Communications came on as CSP’s communications, design, and strategy partner at launch, when the initiative had a mission and a name, but nothing yet built for the outside world to see.

The Challenge

Launching CSP meant solving several problems at once, not in sequence:

Building a visual and verbal identity from a blank page, one flexible enough to hold a primary brand and three distinct sub-brands without losing coherence
Finding a tone of voice for a genuinely new kind of institution, one that had to avoid the two failure modes common across the sector: dry, academic systems-theory language on one side, a “saviour,” consulting-deck tone on the other
Standing up SPx Lab’s Systems Practice Fellowship as a real, functioning programme (sourcing and onboarding fellows, running full multi-day Residencies) while building comms infrastructure from zero, at the same time
Later, extending CSP’s credibility beyond its own programme by documenting, rigorously, how established peer organisations across its network actually practise systems thinking, without turning that documentation into an evaluation of their impact

Brand and visual identity

VIVA designed CSP’s identity system from the ground up: a wave-form logomark that traces the initials “CSP” while doubling as a metaphor for tides, sound, and energy. That wave motif carries the movement, rhythm, and continuity at the centre of systems practice.

The CSP primary logo, from the VIVA-authored brand guideline

The main CSP colour system, defined and documented by VIVA

Built around a primary and secondary colour system (Amaranth Purple and Orange Peel) with three supporting accent tones, and a Bricolage Grotesque and Public Sans typographic pairing, the identity extends into a scalable sub-brand architecture across CSP’s three pillars, SPx Lab, Knowledge, and Network. Each carries its own colour profile, so every pillar reads as distinctly itself while staying unmistakably CSP.

Each pillar carries a distinct purpose within that shared system. SPx Lab is CSP’s capacity-building platform: immersive, field-based learning spaces that today anchor the Systems Practice Fellowship, with workshops, immersions, and design clinics built to grow alongside it over time. Knowledge documents and synthesises field intelligence into case studies, tools, and frameworks, including the “System Practice Unpacked” series, so that systems practice becomes visible and practice-ready for the wider sector rather than staying locked inside any one organisation. Network builds the collaborative ecosystem of partner organisations that makes peer exchange and collective problem-solving possible across CSP’s community.

The resulting brand guideline governs everything from logo construction and clear-space rules to a five-part pattern system, icon and illustration style, and imagery direction. It rolls out consistently across print (impact reports, business cards), digital, social templates, and physical collateral such as lanyards, tote bags, and roll-up banners.

Narrative, voice, and strategy

Alongside the visual system, VIVA built CSP’s verbal identity: narrative architecture, brand positioning, and a tone-of-voice framework that keeps every piece of content practitioner-centred and grounded in lived complexity, reflective and field-aware rather than evangelical or corporate. This sits on top of an audience strategy built around four stakeholder personas and a measurement and adaptive-learning framework, adapted from the AIDA model, to track what’s actually landing.

CSP’s sub-brand logo lockups: SPx Lab, Knowledge, and Network

CSP’s sub-brand colour system: SPx Lab in teal, Knowledge in indigo, Network in orange
SPx Lab appears in both visuals under its original name, Fellowship. The pillar was renamed after this guideline was published; the logo and teal colour carried over unchanged.

An always-on content engine

VIVA runs CSP’s full content operation, month over month: a steady cadence of original posts across Instagram and LinkedIn, a growing YouTube channel, a regular CSP Network Newsletter, and a blog carrying both systems-practice thought leadership and the Knowledge pillar’s ongoing case-study series.

Every post, story, and blog carries the same visual and verbal system as the rest of CSP, so the brand feels consistent whether someone meets it on Instagram, in a long-form blog post, or on the website itself. VIVA also designed, built, and wrote the copy for CSP’s public website (architecture, content, and tone), the primary public front door into everything CSP does.

SPx Lab, on the ground

VIVA is embedded in SPx Lab’s work itself, not just its comms. For every Residency, that means full communications support on the ground: multi-camera coverage of technical sessions, guest-speaker interviews, live social coverage throughout the residency, and structured video interviews with every Fellow. That coverage in turn feeds a growing archive of short-form video, a Fellowship zine, Fellow and speaker profile booklets, structured worksheets, and a full set of collateral used across every cohort and every channel. VIVA has even built a dedicated storytelling-capacity workstream to help Fellows articulate the change their own pilots are creating.

Five practice-based case studies of CSP’s partner network

As part of its Knowledge mandate, CSP has commissioned VIVA to produce five practice-based case studies profiling organisations across its wider network: the Tribal Health Initiative (THI), the Eri Silk value-chain partnership led by SELCO Foundation in Meghalaya, Mahila Housing Trust (MHT), Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), and Collectives for Integrated Livelihood Initiatives (CInI). Published under CSP’s Knowledge pillar as “System Practice Unpacked,” each one documents how the organisation practises systems thinking, its structures, decisions, and trade-offs, rather than evaluating or validating its impact.

Impact So Far

A complete, scalable brand and sub-brand system now live across every CSP touchpoint, from the Fellowship application journey to social templates and printed collateral
A functioning multi-channel content operation built from a standing start: active Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube presences, a regular newsletter, and a growing blog and case-study library
Full communications support for every Fellowship Residency, from live social coverage on the ground to zines, worksheets, and short-form video archives
A fully designed and copywritten public website, live at centreforsystemspractice.org
Enough trust in the work that CSP expanded VIVA’s mandate mid-partnership to commission five independent, practice-based case studies of its wider network

An Ongoing Partnership

The relationship runs on a standing weekly cadence, with new Residencies, new partner case studies, and new programmes folding into the same identity system without it ever needing to be rebuilt from scratch.