Rebrand Vendor Proposal

Montana Legal Services Association

Submitted by:
Tellwell Story Co. · 5 14th St. N. · Fargo, ND 58102
701-566-0750 · wetellwell.com

Submitted to: Hilary Shaw, Montana Legal Services Association Date: September 2026

Cover Letter

Hilary Shaw
Montana Legal Services Association
616 Helena Ave, Suite 100
Helena, MT 59601

hshaw@mtlsa.org


Ms. Shaw,

MLSA has been the only provider of free civil legal services in Montana for sixty years, across all 56 counties and every reservation. The organization that exists today is considerably larger than the one the current logo was drawn for.

We are Tellwell Story Co., a fourteen-person studio in Fargo. Strategy, brand, and web all under one roof, which matters here because your RFP asks for all three from one vendor. The person who writes your positioning guides the team as the website is built.

Reading your RFP and spending time with your site, here is what we understand. You are the only pathway in Montana for free civil legal help, and right now that door has several names on it. MLSA, MontanaLawHelp.org, AskKarla.org, the Montana Debt Options Tool, Justice for Montanans. Each one earned its name honestly. Together they ask a person in crisis to figure out which one is for them. Your renaming question is really an architecture question, and we want to hear from your staff and partners how those pieces actually land before we recommend anything.

We also noticed your homepage carries three different taglines. Each is good on its own. That is what sixty years of growth looks like when the identity has not been asked to keep up.

One honest note. Tellwell has not rebranded a legal aid organization. What we are confident in is supporting mission-driven nonprofits, audiences who need to find help fast, federal and private funders, and boards that need to move together. You can weigh that for yourself in the pages that follow.

When this is finished, you will have a name decision backed by research, an identity your staff in Billings and Kalispell use the same way without a style guide open on the desk, and a website a client can find on a phone at eleven at night.


Max Kringen
Founder, Tellwell Story Co.
max@wetellwell.com · 701-566-0750

Items 1-5

Item 1: Vendor Identification

Vendor's name, address, federal tax identification number or SSN, UBI number, and a description of the vendor's legal status.

  • Legal name: Tellwell, LLC, doing business as Tellwell Story Co.
  • Address: 5 14th St. N., Fargo, ND 58102
  • Federal EIN: 47-5603494
  • SSN: Not applicable
  • UBI number: Not applicable. UBI numbers are issued by the State of Washington. Tellwell is registered in North Dakota. Secretary of State Control ID: 0000147287
  • Legal status: Domestic Limited Liability Company, organized in the State of North Dakota, taxed as an S-Corporation. Active and in good standing since July 1, 2015.

Item 2: Vendor Contact

Vendor contact's name, telephone number, fax number and email.

  • Contact: Max Kringen, Founder
  • Telephone: Office 701.566.0750 · Mobile 701.212.5372
  • Fax: Not applicable

Item 3: Firm Offer

A statement that guarantees that the response constitutes a firm offer valid for sixty (60) days following receipt and that MLSA may accept any time within the 60 day period.

This proposal constitutes a firm offer from Tellwell, LLC, valid for sixty (60) days following MLSA's receipt of this document. Montana Legal Services Association may accept this offer at any time within that sixty-day period, and all pricing, scope, and terms stated here will be honored as written.

Item 4: Relationship Disclosure

A statement on whether the vendor or any employee of the vendor is related by blood or marriage to an MLSA employee or resides with an MLSA employee.

To the best of our knowledge, no owner or employee of Tellwell, LLC is related by blood or marriage to any employee of Montana Legal Services Association, and no owner or employee resides with an MLSA employee. There are no relationships to disclose.

Item 5: Litigation History

State whether the vendor has been a party in any litigation during the past five (5) years.

Tellwell, LLC has not been a party in any litigation during the past five (5) years. There are no matters to describe.

Item 6: Firm Overview & Experience

An overview of your firm and experience with nonprofit organizations or similar sectors. Please include client testimonials or references from similar engagements.

Tellwell Story Co. is a storytelling studio founded in Fargo, North Dakota in 2014 and incorporated in 2015. Fourteen people. Strategy, brand identity, design, web development, and film, all in-house. The only work we place outside our walls is paid media buying. We serve nonprofits, higher education, and mission-driven community organizations across the Upper Midwest and Mountain West.

Everyone assigned to this engagement is a senior practitioner. No junior staff, and no account layer sitting between you and the people doing the work.

Freedom Resource Center for Independent Living

FRC serves people with disabilities across eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, free of charge. When we met them, their mission had grown well past the identity built to carry it, and their audience could not afford confusion. We ran the listening, built the messaging foundation, and designed a visual identity their team could use consistently across programs and offices. Since then, FRC has grown revenue by close to fifty percent and earned Hector International Airport's Accessibility Award.

City of Grafton, North Dakota

A city of about 4,000 in northeast North Dakota, building housing, expanding its hospital, and finishing a flood risk reduction project. Employers there are recruiting and the city needed a way to talk about itself that matched what was actually happening on the ground. We built a human-centered brand and website that gave leadership something to recruit with and gave residents something to rally behind. Strategy through launch, one team, under $40,000.

Item 7: Approach and Methodology

Your process for discovery, design and implementation.
Proposed timeline and milestones. How you will involve the MLSA team in key decisions.

Every Tellwell engagement runs through three phases. Start, Create, Activate.

  • Start is where we listen and decide what is true.
  • Create is where we build the creative assets that share your story.
  • Activate is where we hand it over and make sure your team can use it without us.

The phases are sequential on purpose. We do not open a design file before we know what the organization is trying to say.

For MLSA, that maps to messaging and renaming, then identity, then website and launch. Each phase is named, priced, and approved on its own.

Start: Messaging and Renaming Analysis · $7,500

  • Brand audit of existing materials, the current site, and the relationship in the public's mind between MLSA, MontanaLawHelp.org, AskKarla.org, the Montana Debt Options Tool, and Justice for Montanans
  • Two virtual listening sessions — one with executive management and board leadership, one with staff across offices, client advocates, and community partners
  • A written stakeholder input form distributed statewide, so staff and partners who cannot attend a session still shape the outcome
  • Competitive and peer review of Montana's nonprofit landscape and legal aid organizations in comparable states
  • Audience definitions covering clients, funders, donors, community partners, and the Montana legal community
  • Positioning, core brand message, key messages, and tagline options
  • Renaming analysis with a clear recommendation, tied to what audiences told us and to how a name change would affect the MontanaLawHelp.org relationship
  • Imagery and photo usage guidance

Create: Brand Identity · $10,000

  • Two to three identity directions presented, one chosen for refinement
  • Logo system, color palette, typography, and usage rules
  • Brand style guide covering print and digital application
  • Collateral suite: presentation template, business card, letterhead, banner
  • Photo and imagery guidelines

Activate: Website and Launch · $10,000

  • Design and build on a modern CMS — we will recommend a platform after discovery
  • Site search
  • Accessibility built natively to WCAG 2.1 AA, written into the markup rather than added by an overlay widget
  • Multilingual structure with Spanish support — MLSA supplies Spanish translations, we build the structure and place the content
  • Content migration for up to 25 core pages
  • Quality assurance testing and browser compatibility assessment
  • Training and written documentation for MLSA site editors
  • Implementation plan for rolling the new identity out to partner organizations, donors, and the general public
  • 60-day post-launch support window

How We Involve
the MLSA Team

our team focuses their time on what's most important while we make sure the timeline stays on-track.

1. Messaging Foundation

Approval of messaging foundation and audience definitions

2. Renaming Decision

Change or hold — backed by research and stakeholder input

3. Identity Direction

Selection of the identity direction to carry forward

4. Logo & Style Guide

Approval of final logo system and style guide

5. Website Design

Approval of website design and sitemap

6. Launch Plan

Approval of implementation plan and launch date

Your Team

The people doing the work

Riley Mack

Web Lead

Riley joined Tellwell as a content strategist and built his way into leading our web team. He works where design, story, and data meet, and he is relentless about whether a page actually moves someone to act. On this engagement that means a site where a person in crisis finds the right door quickly.

Sandie Kuehn

Design Lead

Fifteen years of design, spanning the largest rebrands in our region down to a weekly newsletter that has to look right on a phone. Sandie reads before she draws. She builds identity systems by asking what the person on the other end is trying to do, which is the right instinct for an organization whose audience is often reading under pressure.

Megan MacFarlane

Strategy Lead and Project Manager

Megan taught before she ran a nonprofit, and ran a nonprofit before she became a strategist. She has sat in the executive director's chair and knows what a board expects, what a funder expects, and what it costs a small team to say yes to a project like this one. She leads the listening sessions and the renaming analysis, and she is your day-to-day contact.

Max Kringen

Chief Storyteller

Max founded Tellwell in 2014 and is in the room for the strategy work, accountable to you for the engagement overall.

Item 6: References

Client testimonials or references from similar engagements.

Jill Christopher

Chief Executive Officer
Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Red River Valley

701.232.3980 ext. 1131

jill@rmhcfargo.org

Angie Bosch

Executive Director
Freedom Resource Center for Independent Living, Inc.

701.478.0459

angieb@freedomrc.org

Jennifer Dusek

Community Development Director
City of Grafton, North Dakota

701.731.0279

jdusek@graftonnd.gov

Item 8: Detailed Cost Estimate

A detailed cost estimate, including all project phases.

What you are buying here is not a logo. It is the ability for every person at MLSA, in every office, to describe the organization the same way, and for a Montanan who needs help to find you without working at it. We price by phase so you can see exactly what each part costs and approve it on its own.

Payment Schedule

Five equal payments of $5,500.00, spread across the engagement, with the final payment on satisfactory completion.

Invoices carry net 15 terms unless MLSA prefers otherwise.

Item 9: Additional Expenses & Potential Extra Costs

Any additional expenses or potential extra costs.

Everything in the scope above is covered by the $27,500. The following would be additional, and none would be incurred without written approval from MLSA in advance.

Item 10: Project Timeline

A timeline for the project with proposed start and completion dates, including key milestones and review points.

Start: Messaging and Renaming Analysis · November to December 2026

Create: Brand Identity · January to March 2027

Activate: Website and Launch · April to June 2027

Items 11 & 12: Hourly Rate & Format Compliance

Item 11: Hourly Rate and Compensation

A statement of your hourly rate and any other information about your compensation requirements.

Tellwell's hourly rate is $165.00 per hour, applied to approved work outside the scope described in Item 7.

The project itself is scoped and priced as a fixed fee and is not billed hourly. MLSA knows the total investment on the day the contract is signed. We have no other compensation requirements beyond the payment schedule in Item 8.

Item 12: Format Compliance

Proposals that exceed 10 pages in length will not be accepted. Vendors must respond to each question or requirement listed above, restating each requirement and then giving their response.

This proposal does not exceed ten pages. Each numbered requirement from the RFP has been restated and answered in order, and each section closes with a line identifying which requirements it addresses.

Additional Considerations

What's possible next

This proposal covers what you asked for. Worth naming what sits just past it.

MLSA crossed sixty years and has the timeline on your site to prove it. Once the new identity is in place, the natural next move is putting real Montanans on camera describing what happened when someone finally picked up. Client stories, told carefully and with consent, are among the strongest fundraising and awareness assets a legal aid organization can hold.

Films in-house. We make films in-house. When you are ready, we are here. Client stories, told carefully and with consent, are among the strongest fundraising and awareness assets a legal aid organization can hold.

Name architecture beyond the rebrand. The question of how MLSA, MontanaLawHelp.org, AskKarla.org, and the Montana Debt Options Tool relate to one another is bigger than a logo. The Start phase renaming analysis will surface the right path. What follows is a decision your board makes with confidence, not guesswork.

Item 6 Continued: Firm Experience

Freedom Resource Center for Independent Living

FRC serves people with disabilities across eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota, free of charge. Their guiding principle is "Nothing about us without us." When we met them, their mission had grown well past the identity built to carry it, and their audience could not afford confusion.

We ran the listening, built the messaging foundation, and designed a visual identity their team could use consistently across programs and offices. Since then, FRC has grown revenue by close to fifty percent, earned Hector International Airport's Accessibility Award for the role their advocates played in shaping a $123 million terminal expansion, and is heading into the largest end-of-year donor appeal in the organization's history.

We did not do that. FRC did. What we built was an identity sturdy enough to carry them while they got bigger and louder.

Why it matters for MLSA

The mechanics transfer directly. A mission-driven nonprofit whose growth had outpaced its identity. An audience that cannot afford confusion — because a person in crisis should not have to decode which door to knock on. A board that needed to move together. A funder landscape with specific expectations. The parallels are close enough that FRC's experience is the clearest analog in our portfolio for the work MLSA is asking for.

Montana Legal Services Association,

Ready to Do This?

You have spent sixty years being the reason a Montanan kept their housing, left a dangerous home, or held onto a benefit they had earned. That work is yours. It always has been.

Our role is narrower. We help the people who need you find you, understand you, and trust you enough to pick up the phone. We help your funders see the organization you actually are now. Then we hand your team the tools and get out of the way.

Thank you for considering us. Whoever you choose, this is the right work at the right time, and we would be glad to be in it with you.

Let's build something great, together.

With gratitude,
Max Kringen
Founder, Tellwell Story Co. · max@wetellwell.com · wetellwell.com