Season of Promise Website Design and Branding

Season of Promise

Client: Pencils of Promise

Services: Campaign Branding, Website Design, Collateral Design

Role: In-HOUse art Director

This microsite served as a portal for all donors and fundraisers interested in giving during Pencils of Promise's holiday drive, Season of Promise. The campaign needed to reimagining from previous years when building schools was the primary goal. Instead, we shifted to emphasizing the holistic education of a student. The campaign raised over $1.7M in just two months.

Objective

Pencils of Promise changed a lot since the early years of the organization, but the fundamentals of the Season of Promise campaign had stayed the same. What was once just a fundraiser to build schools in Guatemala, Ghana, and Laos, now need to reflect the full impact, including teacher support and hygiene training. Donor's love giving to schools builds because there is a tangible result, the physical school, but education is more than just a place to learn. We needed to figure out a way to inspire donations for what happens within the classroom walls and make it feel just as impactful as building a school.

Process

The first step in my process was to distill the overall brand to its essential elements. Since so much was changing with the campaign messaging, I didn't want to confuse donors more with a complete 180 to the visual identity. The key elements I identified were color and photography. I used them to ground the campaign in what was familiar and allow us to explore a more editorial look for the microsite and campaign assets.

The photography and editorial style was an essential factor for the design since I wanted to emphasize the impact donations would have on the lives of the students served. The goal was to showcase donors' and beneficiaries' mutual humanity, making them both co-heroes in the story. We also added a new function to the microsite that solidified the impact of each donation, a calculator showing how many students would be impacted thanks to user-generated donation amounts.

Outcome

Season of Promise 2017 ran from mid-November to early January and surpassed the fundraising goal of $750K with a $1.7M campaign raise. Exactly 1,733 donors contributed to what was the most successful holiday campaign in Pencils of Promise history, enabling the organization to provide educational opportunities to nearly 23,000 more students globally.