Serving the greater good.

The ELMA Philanthropies provides major philanthropic assistance to children and communities around the globe. It also provides humanitarian relief to help people affected by disasters in any region of the world.

Grant-driven organization.

Unlike most philanthropic organizations, ELMA does not use their website to solicit donations. Rather, their goal is to educate partner organizations, peer foundations, governments, and grantees about the work they do and the research that informs their initiatives.

With this objective in mind, we implemented a feature-rich tool for exploring ELMA’s grant-funded projects. Information on each project is displayed through both a comprehensive searchable list and an interactive map. The map was built entirely with JavaScript to ensure accessibility on mobile devices and tablets. It reveals different information based on user input. Further detail about the projects appears in the list view, where users can filter the grants by foundation, country, type, and year of inception.

This section of the site is maintained through custom back-end features we created specifically for ELMA’s grant information. Users can edit and update a grant by simply checking boxes and choosing designations from a dropdown list. These intuitive tools make it easy for ELMA to keep information current.

Visual aid.

Our strategy for the visual design was to increase the use of photography and to update the interpretation of ELMA’s brand. Large color photographs appear on every page, personalizing ELMA’s initiatives by showing the faces of those who benefit from the grants. Clean lines, sharp edges, and whitespace allow the vibrant patterns in the images to take center stage. ELMA’s brand colors are used as accents throughout the site, except on the interactive map, where blue and orange draw visual interest and clarify the interactive experience. The look-and-feel of the website is now on par with the design elements of ELMA’s print collateral.

A strong foundation.

Our team really enjoyed working with the folks at ELMA on this project. We hope the new website will be a useful calling card for their organization as they continue to build recognition and assist communities in need.

Winner of 2011 American Graphic Design Award from GD USA