BOLTGROUP helped reposition CORE within the larger PlayCore brand, refine its brand strategy and identity, develop a clearer brand architecture, name and organize key service entities, and bring PlayCore’s Community Vitality Framework™ to life as a strategic platform for research, advocacy, education, and measurable community impact.

PlayCore had built a powerful leadership position through its commitment to research, education, advocacy, and evidence-based design. Through CORE, the company offered a wide array of resources and services, including best-practice publications, CEU education, scholar partnerships, National Demonstration Site programs, and data reporting. But that breadth created a strategic challenge.

CORE was more than a department, more than a resource center, and more than a collection of services. It was becoming a platform for helping communities understand, plan, design, measure, and advocate for better play, recreation, and outdoor environments. As PlayCore considered expanding CORE’s role—including the introduction of new data services—the organization needed a clearer way to explain what CORE was, how it created value, and how its offerings worked together.

The challenge was multifaceted: clarify CORE’s position within PlayCore, organize a growing ecosystem of research and service offerings, differentiate free resources from potential paid services, and make the Community Vitality Framework more visible and useful as a strategic lens for community impact. PlayCore’s existing strength was clear. The opportunity was to translate that strength into a more intuitive brand structure, clearer service architecture, and a more compelling expression of CORE’s role in helping communities turn research into practice.

BOLTGROUP worked with PlayCore to refine the strategic role of CORE and bring greater clarity to its expanding ecosystem of research, resources, education, and data-driven services. The work began by examining the relationship between PlayCore, CORE, and the potential future service offerings that could live within the CORE platform. BOLTGROUP also identified the need for brand architecture exploration, customer segment and journey mapping, a CORE brand audit, content audit, naming, identity refinement, voice and tone, visual standards, and marketing strategy for free versus fee-based services.

To make CORE easier to understand and navigate, BOLTGROUP helped organize its offering into a clearer ecosystem of entities:

The Research Institute

A network of scholar experts, universities, and research centers committed to investigating, translating, and disseminating evidence-based knowledge.

The Resource Library

A collection of publications, design guides, planning tools, advocacy resources, curricula, and examples that help communities plan, design, fund, and implement meaningful projects.

The Professional Development Hub

A learning platform that connects research and resources to CEU-eligible education, events, and professional development opportunities.

The Data Service Lab

A data-driven service offering designed to help communities measure, report, and demonstrate the impact of evidence-based environments.

This structure is now reflected on PlayCore’s CORE page, where the Research Institute, Resource Library, Professional Development Hub, and Data Service Lab are presented as distinct but connected parts of the CORE ecosystem.

In addition to those entities, a major part of the work was helping PlayCore make their proprietary Community Vitality Framework™ more central, visible, and actionable.

The framework gave PlayCore and CORE a powerful way to connect research, resources, education, services, and outcomes around a common idea: high-quality play, recreation, and outdoor spaces are essential to healthy communities.

PlayCore describes the Community Vitality Framework™ as a multidimensional approach for advancing the comprehensive impact of resilient communities, grounded in research by scholars and practitioners and organized around seven indicators of healthy, productive communities.

The framework is positioned as a way to organize resources and help communities align PlayCore’s tools, services, and evidence-based practices to their goals. The seven indicators are applied across the Resource

The work helped PlayCore transform CORE from a broad collection of research, education, and data capabilities into a more cohesive, understandable, and scalable brand platform.

CORE now has a clearer role within PlayCore, a more intuitive structure for its offerings, and a stronger strategic connection between research, resources, education, services, and measurable community impact.

The current CORE ecosystem publicly reflects several major outcomes of the work:

• A clearer expression of CORE as PlayCore’s Center for Outreach, Research, and Education
• A defined structure for the Research Institute, Resource Library, Professional Development Hub, and Data Service Lab
• A more visible and actionable Community Vitality Framework™
• A stronger connection between evidence-based research and real-world community outcomes
• A service architecture that can support both free resources and expanded data-driven offerings

The result is a more strategic, usable, and ownable platform that helps PlayCore communicate the value of CORE to communities, advocates, partners, customers, and internal teams.

• Architecture Creates Understanding—CORE’s value was already substantial. BOLTGROUP helped organize that value into a clearer structure that audiences could understand, navigate, and use.
• Research Became a Brand Platform—PlayCore’s research leadership was elevated from supporting content to a central strategic platform for advocacy, education, services, and measurable community impact.
• Naming Clarified the Ecosystem—The Research Institute, Resource Library, Professional Development Hub, and Data Service Lab gave CORE’s expanding offering a more intuitive and scalable structure.
• A Proprietary Framework Created Strategic Cohesion—The Community Vitality Framework gave PlayCore a unifying lens for connecting evidence-based design, community goals, and measurable outcomes.
• Brand Strategy Supported Business Expansion—By clarifying the relationship between free resources and emerging data services, the work created a foundation for future growth while protecting CORE’s mission of outreach, research, and education.