In November of 2022 Impact Visionary closed out an engagement with the Ford Foundation, a prominent grantmaking organization based in New York, and wanted help producing a visual report on their findings for presentation to the client, and eventual dissemination within the industry.

As tasked by Ford, Impact’s work was to design and offer a Wellbeing program to a cohort of Ford’s grantees, who were experiencing symptoms of work burnout and stress, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. These grantees, also known as BUILD grantees, worked in spaces and industries at the forefront of servicing the needs of society's most vulnerable, and needed to be taken care of as well.

Coming onto the project as both a Graphic Designer and Copywriter for the final reports that would be sent to Ford, then shared with other Funders in the wellbeing field, the challenge became clear: how could we demonstrate, both visually and written, the value and subsequent learnings in a clear and precise way? Impact Visionary had uncovered structural issues with the way Philanthropy operated in general, and was struggling to strike a tonal balance between making strong recommendations and keeping things light and positive.

To address this tonal challenge, I redirected the client’s attention away from the small, word-smithy edits that tend to arise when work is held so closely and dearly, and instead brought their attention to the big themes by presenting a clear set of limiting factors: page limit. We only had 15 or so pages to work with, and with design and all copy were landing somewhere around 21. With that clear reminder, the client was able review copy with a critical eye and focused on conveying strong recommendations to Funders in the field.

This need for tonal balance also translated to the design process; early on in the engagement I quickly discovered that working within Impact Visionary’s strong brand kit severely limited my ability to produce an “elegant-looking” report, as requested by the client. To address this design challenge, I focused on creating soft shapes and muted headlines that were clearly distinguishable from other elements such as quotes, lists, and titles, and arrived at a design that the client was thrilled with.

See the full report here.