Website and Sponsorship Kit: AEC Cares

AEC Cares is an annual charity event that builds connections between Architects, Engineers, and Construction professionals. It focuses on rebuilding a community center during the AIA conference every year and solicits major donations, built on B2B connections. I re-branded and re-designed the materials for this event.

A PDF can be emailed to the CEO or even printed out and sent to an office, which remained the most user-friendly choice for soliciting large B2B donations. AEC Cares also needed an online presence to register the volunteers, interact on social channels and re-enforce the charity's legitimacy.

Since the site was the second priority regarding the campaign, the goals were simple, a single page, continuous scrolling website organized to registering volunteers. Because it was likely to be emailed to the project donors' employees during work hours, this site was designed to be viewed on a desktop first. When I first went to redesign the campaign, we reviewed the information architecture, on the website, and decided it was still valid. Redesigning the site was primarily done by changing the CSS styles.

What needed rework was the approach to color and photography. As a subsidiary of ConstructConnect, AEC Cares was using its color palette of blues and oranges - but the previous iterations focused more heavily on a bright blue, which made the art feel cold and distant. I started by bringing in more of the oranges and a secondary warm grey to make the materials feel more human and welcoming. The original photography disregarded humanity too, using obviously staged stock photography as a hero image, and shots of a damaged community center to solicit pity from contributors. I redesigned the hero image to focus on portraiture, which emphasized donors would be helping the people, and used shots of previous volunteers, doing the work that made the community centers better, to show the potential for connection.

The final results of the redesign and other marketing efforts resulted in a net improvement in new donors, and a fully staffed volunteer event, despite being the event being under new management.