Community Foundation Southwest Washington
Crafting an impact report design
SECTOR
Design
Nonprofit
Community Support
SERVICES PROVIDED
Graphic Design, Social/Email Graphics
Community Foundation Southwest Washington (CFSW) is a regional nonprofit connecting critical resources with transformational ideas for a more equitable southwest Washington. Through their endowments and scholarships, the Foundation has improved the lives of many underrepresented individuals and communities. This was especially true during the COVID pandemic, which they wanted to highlight in a new impact report.
The Client
We collaborated with the team at CFSW to complete a COVID response fund report that would highlight the Foundation’s COVID response work over an entire year. Additionally, we were tapped to create a series of report-related graphics to be used for social media and email communications.
The Challenge
While the client had multiple sources of valuable data that were all important to the report, it was challenging to condense into a simple design — requiring loads of design and strategic guidance, creativity, patience, and iteration to reach the finish line. The Foundation also wanted to call out the various donor groups that helped support their fundraising efforts and which directly benefited people in their communities. All of this in a compact, 8-page report.
“Maria quickly grasped the context of the report, including our audience and goals, and even went above and beyond our feedback to ensure each detail was communicated in a logical and stylish way. The finished product was more than an external report, because it also helped our team quantify and celebrate what we had accomplished during an extremely challenging couple of years.”
J. Maury Harris
Senior Communications Officer
The Solution
Icons to the rescue. We created relevant icon graphics to represent the different donor categories and break up the information into quick, digestible “nuggets” of data. This helped give readers an “at-a-glance” experience that was straightforward yet visually interesting.
Instead of a long list of donor names and recipients, we categorized this information into alphabetical order with clean labeling and personalized graphics.
Finally, we took the main design of the impact report and translated it into a series of graphics that could be used for social and email purposes, further extending the content to a broader set of stakeholders.
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