A New Site to Bring Clarity to Important work
Humanity United is a philanthropic organization that provides grants and funding for initiatives and programs at the intersection of human rights, peacebuilding, locally-grounded action, and systems-influencing to recognize shared humanity. Their trust-based approach honors the lived experience and agency of those closest to the issues they focus on.
They came to Teal for help updating their website to bring more clarity to the critical work they do.
The Challenge
Humanity United wanted to create an accessible, easy-to-navigate online experience to showcase their work and the work of their grantee partners. The existing site was dated, and did not visually capture the vibrance and global elements so important to their mission. Navigating through content was cumbersome and confusing, and it was hard to really understand what they do.
Internally, Humanity United needed to have a lot of conversations around how to categorize their work, and which programs and initiatives to feature to tell the clearest story. The website redesign prompted them to have those conversations, and allowed us to come up with a site architecture that makes sense for where they are now, and gives them flexibility to grow and change quickly as their priorities shift to reflect the changes in the world.
“Success to me is an easily navigable website that tells a clear and complete story of Humanity United’s work, vision, mission, and values – and how all of that fits together.” – client quote from project discovery survey
The Solution
Partnering closely with the Humanity United team, Teal developed an intuitive site architecture that showcases their four key areas of work – Forced Labor & Human Trafficking, Peacebuilding, Public Engagement, and Racial Justice & Equity – and how their efforts in each area tie back to their main mission.
Key site features include:
- Work detail pages that tell the story of their efforts, and provide users with links to deeper pages on related initiatives.
- Featured story components that highlight grantee partner successes. Humanity United honors the agency their partners have being in charge of their own narrative, so instead of creating stories in the site, we linked directly to partner websites.
- A filterable grantee partner database that allows users to explore the full portfolio of Humanity United’s decades of work.
- A dedicated Perspectives section where Humanity United could share their expertise, learnings and opinions about the global space in which they work. A robust underlying taxonomy allows users to easily filter articles, and also sets the site up to dynamically display new and related content across the site.
A True Partnership for Success
Throughout our engagement together, what really stood out was the true partnership between Humanity United and Teal. The Humanity United team came as experts of their organization and content, and Teal came as experts in user experience and design. We had a lot of productive working sessions that paired both of these expertise areas. Coming together in this way created an open collaborative environment for discussion and solutions. No doubt it was a strong contributor to the success of this project.
Over the last four months, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with Teal Media on the website refresh project for Humanity United (HU). I’m very impressed by their high level of professionalism and their willingness to help us refine and reconfigure the structure and design of our new website, making it user-friendly and visually appealing. I particularly value Teal Media’s commitment to incorporating HU’s values into our designs and choices, and I fully recommend their services.
