“Our goal is to end ultra poverty in Uganda.”

— Raising The Village

A new brand +
a new website

Raising The Village (RTV) is a non-profit that partners with last-mile, rural communities in Uganda and develop initiatives that pave the pathway out of ultra poverty towards economic self-sufficiency, using a unique investment-based development plan.

I liked them when we started this project, but by the end I absolutely loved them. It was an honour have a microscopic part in the amazing work they are doing.

Time for something new.

In early 2020, Raising The Village underwent a rebranding process. This included a new logo, new brand guidelines, an evolution of their voice and tone, and culminated in a brand new website to be launch in the fall of 2020. Hats off to the lead designer Jennifer Au for an absolutely terrific job on the new branding.

Having written copy and reports for RTV in the past, I was approached with the task of taking on all the UX writing for their new website.

Since the new website would mark the launch of the new branding, I was also asked to help give some shape and direction to the evolution of RTV’s voice and tone.

The Process

Research: I read all the RTV annual reports I could find, watched RTV videos on YouTube, read through the old website, and had a look at the first pass of copy ideas from the team. Shawn Cheung, founder and CEO, made himself super available and was always up for a chat. I had a lot of great conversations with him and Jen Au (Creative Director) to get a sense of RTV’s DNA. Once we established the overarching narrative we wanted to share and zoned in on the target audience, I was off to the races!

Teamwork: Jen had already completed the sitemap and a lot of the UI design on Figma. I was able to work directly with her as well as the lead developer right from the start. We were constantly messing around with different variations of layouts, tweaking the sizes, trying different heading and subheadings. Almost nothing was set in stone and everyone on the team had enough trust that working with new feedback and revisions was a breeze. Working together we were able to approach design, dev, copy, and strategy as one team.

Writing: Once we locked the pages, I buckled down and got to writing—a lot of writing. I’m a firm believer that the most important part of the writing process is rewriting. As the project progressed, I worked hard to get approval on the copy quickly and move all the work onto Figma as soon as possible to work directly in the UI design. Being able to finalize the copy directly in the final design made all the difference.

Then there was some extra work that came up. RTV asked me to have a look at rewriting the content and names of their values to be more in line with the new branding. I was also asked to rethink how they could communicate the 5 critical goals RTV had committed to as part their contribution to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Beta: The clock was ticking! The final copy and images were added to the beta site, and then the dev team was kind enough to put up with a couple of last minute edits after I had the chance to live with the beta site for a few days and experience it IRL. There were some adjustments to the launch date on the client side but in the end everything made it on time and the new website was launched on schedule.