WomenStrong International is a global non-profit that moves power and money into the hands of women-led organizations around the world. The impact and opportunity of their unique approach to philanthropy — one that centers women leaders and takes direction from their partners — was buried in a confusing sitemap and rigid, text-heavy website template. In 2024, we teamed up for a total digital overhaul, including a new design system and component library, plus copywriting and custom WordPress development.

Designing a streamlined component library that amplifies WomenStrong’s brand

We knew from the jump that we wanted to create a design system that was as dynamic and inviting as the women powering WomenStrong. We also knew that the team’s asset library was very limited — while we wanted to showcase and celebrate WomenStrong’s global partners, we wouldn’t be able to rely on an endless supply of photography to fuel the site’s new look and feel.

Instead, we used WomenStrong’s rich brand color palette and pattern library, strong shapes inspired by the “woven” logo, and hand drawn elements to produce photo collages to evoke WomenStrong’s collaborative and partner-centric ethos. 

From there, we built a small but flexible library of components that the WomenStrong team could use to build new, visually striking pages, with moments of animation and interaction to spark discovery and engagement. 

Honing WomenStrong’s messaging to drive engagement 

WomenStrong is redefining philanthropy to center local leaders who are improving the lives of women and girls in their communities. It’s a very different perspective from most Western nonprofit organizations, and explaining the why and the how behind their approach was overpowering the primary mission of the website: donations. We worked with the WomenStrong team to transform the blocks of long, highly academic text that comprised the majority of their website into more digestible and captivating content blocks that encourage users to take action as they scroll down a page and navigate through the site. 

Consolidating content types into a single resource hub to take the guesswork out of site governance

The original WomenStrong site was built to keep different content types siloed: one place for news, one for events, one for resources, one for stories, and so on. But this content strategy is tricky to manage for two key reasons. First, it tends to create double (or triple) the work: obviously an upcoming event is published in the events category — but do you also publish a news post announcing it? And what happens if there are resources or stories that the event produces?

Second, siloing content instantly reveals if you aren’t producing a steady volume of content across all categories.

We resolved both by creating a unified content hub, with easy to manage filters to help target specific types of content.