Each year, the George Gund Foundation commissions a fine art photographer to highlight a theme within the Foundation’s giving for its annual report. N+S captures the culminating portfolio in an annual website design each year. The 2019 theme, “Refugees and Immigrants,” was captured by photographer Fazel Sheikh.
The annual website replaces older methods of nonprofit annual reporting, which relied on microsites that acted as companions to core sites, but drove traffic to a separate domain and increased bounce rates. Collapsing the Foundation’s annual report with its digital footprint resulted in significant increases in visitors to their website, including a 223% increase in traffic to the executive director’s annual letter in the first month alone.
The Work
To bring awareness to the work taking place across their funding areas, The George Gund Foundation commissions a fine art photographer each year to highlight a theme within the Foundation's giving for its annual report.
N+S has captured the culminating photographic portfolio in an annual report microsite, which acted as a companion to the Foundation’s main site.
The Results
This year, the companion microsite didn't feel like enough. Instead, we proposed a completely new digital strategy to the Foundation: an annual website. A fresh approach to nonprofit web design, the idea behind the annual website is that each year, we will design an entirely new website for the Foundation.
While core content such as the "Grantmaking" section of their website will carry over, all other aspects of the Foundation's site will be reimagined and redesigned.
Collapsing the Foundation’s annual report with its digital footprint resolves issues that arose from segmenting audiences between the Foundation's main site and microsite. The strategy also expands the life of the Foundation’s annual report. The new annual website strategy has already resulted in significant increases in visitors to their website, including a 223% increase in traffic to the executive director’s annual letter in the first month alone.
This year's theme, “Refugees and Immigrants,” is captured by photographer Fazel Sheikh. When the visitor lands on the site, they are confronted by Sheikh's portraits—overlaid with striking red lines that allude to the American flag and are animated to move like the flag in the wind.
These lines are carried throughout the site, acting as interactive redactions on quotations pulled from the executive director's and board chair's annual letters. The design capitalizes on growing tensions around refugee and immigration policy in the United States, and echoes the call for action so clearly outlined by the Foundation's leadership.
