The Forge
The Forge is Central Oregon’s first two-sheet ice facility—a community-built, debt-free nonprofit bringing year-round, NHL-regulation ice to Bend, Oregon. Savy partnered with The Forge from the ground up, leading brand naming and positioning, visual identity, website design and SEO copywriting, and go-to-market strategy for the capital campaign launch. Together, we built the full digital foundation The Forge needed to turn a bold vision into a fundraising and community movement, and we continue to support the campaign as it works toward breaking ground.
VISIT WEBSITEBrand Naming & Identity
Before there was a name, there was a working title and a blank slate. Savy led brand positioning from the ground up: naming, voice, and identity development for a facility with no existing brand equity to build from. We deliberately steered away from generic terms like “Arena,” “Center,” and “Complex”—words that signal traditional facilities with traditional failure rates—in favor of a name that could carry a story. The result was The Forge, a name built around transformation, where raw material meets heat, pressure, and intention and emerges changed. Steel. Timber. Ice. It’s a name that mirrors the facility itself: championship ice forged through community heat. That story gave the client a positioning line and campaign platform strong enough to anchor everything that followed, from voice guidelines to merchandise.
Logo Design
The Forge’s identity needed to work as hard on a hoodie as it does on a building. Savy developed a wordmark that pairs bold, architectural letterforms with an angular accent mark, a visual nod to an anvil, capturing the fire-meets-ice moment at the heart of the brand. The mark is bold but not aggressive, strong enough for hockey and welcoming enough for figure skating families, and built to hold up at any scale. We developed full logo variations, a standalone icon for small-scale applications, and a complete brand guidelines system covering color palette, typography, and application. From there, the identity extended across social banners, merchandise, and facility signage, so The Forge could show up consistently everywhere it needed to.
Website Design & SEO Copywriting
With no existing digital footprint, The Forge needed a website that could do triple duty as pitch deck, awareness tool, and fundraising hub from day one. Savy built the site architecture and wrote full SEO copywriting for an MVP launch spanning eight core pages. Every page was grounded in a dedicated keyword strategy targeting high-intent local search terms, alongside brand and destination terms The Forge needed to own outright. On-page SEO, including title tags, meta descriptions, header structure, internal linking, and schema markup, was built in from the start, positioning The Forge to rank locally the moment the site went live.
Go-To-Market Strategy
Launching a capital campaign for a facility that doesn’t exist yet meant building trust before ever making an ask. Savy developed the full go-to-market strategy for The Forge’s launch around a phased approach across an eight-week period, moving from Awareness to Engagement to Activation, with email, social, and paid media coordinated so every channel told the same story in sequence. The strategy also built in donor segmentation from day one, so the right message reached the right audience at the right moment, and the public list scaled through organic reach, PR, and targeted paid media.
Ongoing Support
With the foundation in place, Savy continues to support The Forge through ad management, social content, and campaign optimization. We manage a recurring content cadence across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn tied to a monthly content calendar, and we continue producing blog and updates content that keeps the community engaged as the project moves forward.