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Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence

At a glance

Type:
Nonprofit
Location:
King County, Washington
Launch Date:
October 2, 2023
Services:
  • Custom Website Design
  • Custom WordPress Features
  • Custom WordPress Theme
  • Design Refresh
  • Front-End Development
  • Information Architecture
  • Responsive Design
  • Training

Visit the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence website

Home page design of EndGV.org on a desktop computer. Multiple large sections welcome the visitor, describe what the organization does, provides links to all major program areas, and lists related news and events. The final section before the footer invites people to join or donate.
The EndGV.org full home page on small screens. The content is identical to desktop, but the main menu is collapsed and all content appears in a single column.

The Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence works to support and amplify the work of over 40 different organizations and countless individuals in King County working to end domestic violence, sexual abuse, and human trafficking.

The challenges of capturing a movement

Building websites for coalitions and other types of capacity-building organizations is tricky work! Websites for organizations like these must serve a wide range of visitors with different interests and lenses. This coalition faced these and related challenges, as they needed to showcase their broad and deep knowledge in areas of legal, policy, housing, transformative justice, behavior health, and more!

Six irregular shapes of different colors represent the six program areas of CEGV: Violence Prevention & Community Safety, Housing & Homelessness, Civil Legal System, Behavior Health, Public Policy, and Tools for Community & Membership Organizations
Flowing and irregular shapes define much of the new website’s design, consistent with the overlapping, collaborative, and human work it represents.

The website arrived at a critical moment for the Coalition, as they transitioned from a long-time Executive Director to a new co-Executive Director model. After changing their name five years before, this new website provided a useful opportunity to refine how CEGV described its work, and reintroduce itself to membership and the broader community.

Honoring an organization while staying on brand

The five-year old brand was extremely bright (and yellow)! Coalition staff felt that their work did need to be bold and cutting-edge, but they also felt that the previous design lacked the humanity and thoughtfulness that defined their approach. To capture the bold and people-centric approach, the new design emphasized curved shapes and edges, asymmetrical “color fields”, irregular and overlapping shapes, and pictures and illustrations of people.

The final design still makes an immediate impression with a big visual pop, but is more welcoming and thoughtful.

The first screen of the EndGV.org home page. A vibrant blue-purple-maroon color field is topped with a bold statement and an irregularly cropped image of hands in a circle. The colors are very bold and bright and the shapes are unusual for a web design.
People and the work they do in social movements rarely have hard edges.

Putting the important stuff first

That level of care and thought continues to the primary landing pages for each area of the Coalition’s work. After completing a detailed content audit and site restructuring, each new landing page was created in collaboration with the content-area experts using a standardized template. The new landing page template quickly and clearly communicates the impact of the Coalition’s work and then provides access to the critical resources, documents, and projects that the Coalition has created in that area.

Housing & Homelessness page opens with purply-blue background and illustration of 5 confident people behind an irregular red blob. The top section says "Bridging gaps, building bridges; working to ensure that in King County, survivors will not have to choose between homelessness or staying in an abusive relationship.
For each area of work, the Coalition has a page stating what they do and how it impacts their community.

Collaboration and community

Building a new website that honors stakeholder voices and truly reflects an entire organization takes time. In our collaboration, we worked hard to listen to the voices of staff and external stakeholders—captured by a recent survey and focus groups used for strategic planning. This was not the easiest way to work, but was required to capture the full range of needs and desires of the Coalition. As organizations continue to switch to models of distributed leadership and less hierarchy, more and more projects will need to slow down, listen to many voices, be open to changing course, and commit to continued growth and evolution of the site after it launches.

In this case, that messiness and hard work, led to a new website that showcases a crucial community of advocates. And that site that will support their work for years to come in the quiet moments of human collaboration and the loud moments of change-making.