UN Global Compact Network Australia
The Client
The UN Global Compact Network Australia (GCNA) is the Australian, business-led network of the United Nations Global Compact — the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, with over 10,000 participating businesses and 3,000 non-business organisations around the globe.
The Brief
Communications Strategy, Visual Identity Refresh & Website Design
When Kylie, Executive Director for the GCNA, and I caught up in mid-2019, we got chatting about their website. Last touched in 2016, it was long overdue for some improved UX and visual refresh. More pressing, however, was to fix much of the basic functionality that the website had lost over time so that they could increase their capacity to manage this in-house, whilst also having a greater impact on their audience.
As a workhorse for the prolific information they publish, their website is front-and-centre of their communications strategy as they push out news updates, media releases, podcasts, and publications.
It’s such important work they do; from business and human rights, through to environment and climate change, anti-bribery and corruption and sustainable development. They provide a valuable link for organisations of all sizes — from the very biggest corporates in Australia, through to SMEs who are committed to sustainable business practices.
The Creative
In outlining an approach to their brief, I saw an opportunity to streamline their messaging so that their audience could more readily absorb the impact that they have and the value they create.
A strategy workshop was one of the first activities we undertook together as we crafted audience profiles and discussed a plan for how their website could be organised to best meet the needs of their member base. We were then able to articulate a clear set of messages with an appropriate hierarchy to lead with on their homepage.
As part of the United Nations but with a local ‘brand’ and profile, the brief was to be sympathetic to their parent organisation, whilst not being afraid to build a profile and personality of their own. The creative reflected this, with a similar colour palette utilised and a bold and modern new typographical direction.
We invested a lot of time in procuring a dynamic image library to invest in for use across the website, as well as for the raft of content that they regularly publish. We went big and bold with the images, building off some of the important themes they work with.
I enlisted Stephen from Andelo to assist with the Wordpress development, who did a great job, as ever. It was with great pride that we all unveiled the new site in late April 2020.
It couldn’t be better timing for a world that reels from Covid-19 and the many, many questions it will undoubtedly pose for businesses as we contain the virus, and move beyond this to recovery.
