Demonstrating Impact: Past, Present, and Future

Rewriting Our Future is a clear departure from the existing brand identity. That approach is a statement all on its own. The direction we took was to tell the world that WEDO is an organization continuing the legacy of its iconic founders in a bold new way. That foundation isn’t just a good story — which it is — but it’s a philosophy. The overall visual direction was created to carry through the Past, Present, future motif in a way that makes it seamlessly coherent regardless of which section a person is exploring. It’s a serious and grounded aesthetic without being dry or academic. It feels personal and human — a big challenge around advocacy and policy work.

Lastly, because WEDO is central to convening in the space, it clearly includes their work with partners, actively encouraging new partnerships.

It’s unusual to include a forward-looking section in an impact report. But this is where some of the most prominent messaging was needed. One of the functions of an impact report is to retain funders and attract additional donors. Typically the role of a Strategic Plan, we felt it was important to highlight WEDOs vision because their work isn’t about single projects, but about advocacy work and coalition building over time. What’s happening today is going to bear fruit in the future and the messaging needs to inspire partners and funders to support this complex and long-term approach.

How do you create an engaging impact report? You make it interactive and allow readers to move through it in whatever order most interests them. 

Strategically we opened with a minimalist page that immediately creates a curiosity gap. It asks the reader to make one of three choices. There’s a clear plan for the flow of information, but it’s open to different choices as well.

We talk a lot about creating scroll-stopping experiences to win in the attention economy. Many aspects of the impact report are designed to do just that. They’re interactive sections where a reader can choose how deep they want to go into the information available. These sections ask people to pause, rather than do a long scroll, which many digital impact reports end up doing. Instead a single section offers a lot of information packages into bite-sized pieces that capture the reader’s attention.

One of these pieces is a transparent geodesic sphere that highlights current activity while showing the interconnected nature of WEDO’s work. It was an intentional choice to take this approach over a more traditional impact map since WEDO convenes global coalitions that attend conferences all over the world.

Because policy advocacy and coalition building takes place over many years, we decided early on in the process to avoid limiting the storytelling to just 2024. We looked at the past 3-5 years to paint a picture of accomplishments across the network of organizations that WEDO participates in, contributes to, and leads.

With that in mind, we worked with their team to create compact stories packed with information that communicate the idea of ongoing work. Each advocacy area is accompanied by photos of the activists involved in the work, bring humanity to this process-heavy work.

The process of creating the social media assets for the monthlong awareness campaign that followed the release of the impact report was an effective merging of design and content strategy. We used updated messaging from the report combined with the new visual identity to create memorable social posts.  The announcement of the report, and the Past, Present, Future sections of it provided the structure for weekly social posts, direct outreach, and targeted email. 

We created a campaign that delivered on the idea that the impact report is an ongoing asset for awareness and fundraising — rather than a single announcement that might be missed by important funders, partners, and other stakeholders.

The impact report is a visual feast intended to draw people in and hold their attention. We used photography from WEDOs library of images from their convenings to convey the authenticity of the written content.

In the Our Future section, we used the power of video to change it up and ensure that the report exceeded expectations. We encouraged their team to record impromptu interviews at COP29 asking attendees to describe their vision of a gender-just future. Each clip was held under 30 seconds to move people through the initial section of that page while delivering forward-looking messaging that set an inspiring, yet grounded tone. 

As the report was being announced, the WEDO team was heading to a conference where they would be meeting with several partners and potential partners. They wanted to do more than just mention the report. We saw this as an opportunity to create a physical leave behind/handout usable throughout 2025.

The result is a postcard designed to be more than something that ends up in the bottom of a conference swag bag. We worked with the WEDO team to create something that people would want to frame and have on their desk as inspiration for the work that they’re doing with WEDO.

We tied email templates to the rollout campaign as well, designed to be a repeatable framework to efficiently roll out the campaign as well as becoming part of their digital collateral moving forward. The templates reflect the impact report branding tying all of the rollout campaign elements together.