Global Rights for Women

Global Rights for Women (GRW) reached out to partner on their brand because they were in need of a new website. After chatting about the current website functionality and the overall brand, it became clear that brand strategy, messaging and a visual brand refresh were also needed. They hadn’t done much on their internal brand work and as the team grew, they had a lot of need to bring all their brand efforts together so communication was consistent and cohesive.

We kicked off our work with GRW with a 90-minute brand strategy call that included members of the team, all from various programs. After walking through a high-level overview of their work, the big ‘problem’ became clear – their biggest challenge was communicating what they do in a way that was easy to understand. With so many various stakeholders that engage the organization, our next right step was to define who needed to most hear and understand their message.

We zeroed in on three distinct audiences – the NGOs, the donors/foundations and the advocates. From there, we worked through what each audience market needed to know in order to effectively engage with GRW and their work.

The result was a 50+ page Brand Playbook that walked through all the basic strategy and messaging components so that the GRW team could consistently and effectively communicate with their right audiences.

With the strategy in place, it was time to move onto visuals.

GRW didn’t want a complete overhaul of their existing visual brand, but rather, a refresh. Their logo hadn’t been updated since the organization’s founding in 2014 and the overall visual direction didn’t feel aligned. Additionally, they didn’t have any logo variations to utilize which negative affected the logo’s legibility.

Logo updates

To help embody the power and strength the organization wanted to communicate, we swapped in a bold font that felt more empowering and strong. We kept the two circles, which signify connection and their global reach, only making a small adjustment to the alignment within the entire composition. Lastly, we gave them a variety of variations to use, based on their needs.

Typography and color updates

The GRW team wanted to stick with their blue and yellow but also wanted a little more variety. So, we expanded the color palette to include a darker teal color and orange, while staying in the same color saturation level.

For the typography, we wanted to keep with the strong and powerful theme and selected a bold sans serif. For the body font, we wanted something easy to read and aligned on a serif font.

Brand collateral

Reports and presentations were a big part of communication GRW’s work so we created a template for each. This allowed anyone on the team to create a vital brand collateral piece while staying consistent and cohesive.

GRW’s current site (at the time) was clunky and hard for them to update, which was a primary concern. Additionally, they had a LOT of resources to share and wanted to make sure the new site was easy to navigate and find publications, reports and papers. Lastly, they wanted to better leverage the new site for donations.

Based on those high level goals, we mapped out a new sitemap (what pages to include and structure of those pages) and wireframe.

This is where we could highlight the different components of the website and specifically address the three different audiences that would be utilizing the site. While the primary goal was to serve donors, the site also needed to support potential NGOs and organizations that would want to engage with GRW.

We landed on a 17-page layout that highlighted GRW’s work, made it easy for potential organizations to engage with the organization and made it easy for visitors to make a donation.

What we love most about this process is that there aren’t many surprises – since the client approved the wireframe, this phase is really just aesthetics. And, since we went through the entire branding process with them, we had a great handle on their brand and personality, allowing us to really bring it to life.