UN Foundation
Helping an influential organization you've never heard of go public and grow its base.
Transforming an organization through storytelling
Created by Ted Turner's billion dollar donation to the UN, after a decade of working largely behind the scenes on a huge diversity of global issues, the UN Foundation (UNF) is a visionary and innovative force for global change. Yet, several years ago the organization found itself at a crossroads.
Ted’s original grant was running low, and they knew they needed to invest in building their own institution by focusing their campaign work, shifting their orientation to be more publicly known, and diversifying their funding base. Impressed by our award winning collaboration on their most successful movement building campaign — Nothing But Nets — the UNF asked us to help them with the transition.
The digital vision is the organizational vision
Our new digital vision was the first tangible project that brought this transformation into the world. The collaborative nature of our process invited their many strong internal leaders out of their individual silos to expose the common threads that united all their work, and forced a view of “the whole” rather than only that of the constituent campaign parts.
Their integrated digital vision brought principles of storytelling, collaboration, constituency building, and public engagement and set these as organizational targets, which forced conversations about the very nature of their campaigns, how they measured success, and how each one’s efforts supported the work of the whole organization.
The process even produced an unexpected benefit — defining for the first time the UNF’s “offering” and theory of change that spanned all their best work. Excited by our discovery, the UNF adopted the insights from the vision as the foundation for their five-year business and campaign planning process across all campaigns of the 150 person organization.
Growing a constituency of global citizens
Embracing the new vision catalyzed a number of internal changes at UNF. First, that in order to build their profile and grow a constituency — especially with people beyond the policy world of the UN — they needed to greatly simplify how they talked about what they do. Second, they needed to learn to become more integrated in their work, and third, to become more consistent in telling stories rather than publishing data.
After leading them through the process of defining their common audiences (for the first time) we created detailed personas of potential supporters, and used this information to inform all future design decisions. We created a radically different information architecture and content plan that would explain the complex work of UNF to these audiences. We “baked in” their key messages into their site’s structure, and created a multimedia “story cube” that shows — at a quick glance in a creative way — the UNF’s six focus areas, while highlighting impacts from each of those campaigns.
Transformative outcomes inside and out
Within just a few months the new site created impact on the organization and the broader world, with hundreds of new stories, multimedia, videos, and podcasts published from their many active campaigns, dozens of actions created to engage audiences, and their constituency expanded by more than 6,000 people. Today it is over 160,000 strong. We also won a leading industry award for most innovative website of the year!
With web values of storytelling, connecting and participation as the new mantra, the site’s innovative tools have helped supporters feel more connected to the work of the UN, and the UNF has become a stronger and more cohesive platform for connecting people, ideas and resources to help the UN solve global problems.
