Simplifying Habitat India’s pan-nation work and strengthening its digital presence

CONTEXT + CHALLENGE

Habitat For Humanity India has been redeveloping communities through housing and sanitation for over 35 years. While their scale and impact across the country has been immense, they were struggling to articulate and share the volume and depth of their work to important stakeholders like funders and partners. Habitat India came to us to help them communicate their complex work through their website - a platform that reaches a wide audience.

 

APPROACH + LEARNINGS

Our goal for the project was to capture the intensity of Habitat’s work and yet simplify it for a wide external audience to understand. We were tasked to tell the Habitat narrative in a way that built credibility for the organisation, inspired donors, partners, and volunteers, and invited them to engage further with the organisation. While Habitat across the world is associated with housing, in India the organisation also focuses heavily on sanitation and disaster relief. This breadth of work was important for volunteers and supporters to not only be aware of but also see how they could engage and play a role at various levels. The success of the scale of Habitat is dependent on the large volunteer and supporter base, and we had to keep the look, tone, language, and content of the website simple and inviting with multiple calls to action to create opportunities to engage.

 

SOLUTION

We designed and wrote content for the website to showcase all three areas of work in equal importance, and through our narrative showed the link of all three towards Habitat’s common theme of “a safe place to stay”.  We used interactive design in the form of a map to showcase the scale of Habitat’s work across the country, with the goal of simplifying large amounts of data and making it interesting and relatable to our audience. 

 

In our research with the team, volunteers, and beneficiaries, we found that one of Habitat India’s unique qualities was the care they had for every house and every person they impact. While the numbers on the map were impressive, the individual stories really defined the work and the organisational ethos. Inspired by the stories from the field, we designed a section on the website that shared all the impact stories from the field. 

 

The combination of individual stories, interactive data, simplified narrative and multiple calls to action worked well to increase traffic and interest in Habitat.

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