Climate Conscious

The Bezos Earth Fund is Jeff Bezos’ personal commitment to fund scientists, activists, NGOs, and others to help drive solutions to climate change that are rooted in nature. It officially launched in late 2020 with the ambitious goal to distribute $10 billion to these efforts by the year 2030.

Unlike other philanthropists and nonprofits that have a narrower focus, such as The Gates Foundation, which funds vaccine research and strives to eradicate malaria, the Bezos Earth Fund’s mission is more expansive.

The Bezos Earth Fund team asked us to create a more robust website that better communicates who they are and showcases the nature of their work, along with a new brand identity for the organization.

This was originally designed as a 16-week engagement for brand strategy, web design, and development. Over the first eight weeks, the team conducted research that I was able to use later as the project morphed into more of traditional website redesign. When I was brought onboard in week eight, I helped team quickly finalize the information architecture, content strategy, and tagging structure.

With the short timetable and shift in priorities, a lot of work happened in parallel, with UX, design, and development all working simultaneously. I worked closely with our back-end developers while designing wireframes so that we could build a system that was flexible and reusable, while also working closely with our designers and front-end developers to make sure all of the content was easily accessible. In the end, we designed a beautiful, user-friendly website that showcased the Bezos Earth Fund's new, cohesive visual identity.

The Bezos Earth Fund had a preliminary website that highlighted their underlying mission, programs, and the grants they had already awarded. That site emphasized that there is “no silver bullet” for solving climate change. It’s a complex puzzle involving many moving parts.

The site was quite shallow, with only five or six total pages. All of the content was built in collapsable accordions, including programs, grants, and even news articles. My job was to structure their content in a way that highlights all of the work that the Bezos Earth Fund is doing, shows how their grants, programs, and initiatives work together, and showcases their amazing photography.

Before we could start thinking about color palettes and writing catchy headlines, our brand team needed to go through an extensive discovery process. We put peer organizations under the microscope and talked to over a dozen stakeholders, from the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund to some of the organization’s grantees.

We homed in on the innovative approaches the Earth Fund and their grantees are deploying to successfully address climate change. Hearing from such a wide range of perspectives gave us a sense of what people were excited about, potential obstacles, and how the Earth Fund understood their audience.

Taking what we learned, we crafted a strategy narrative that articulated the Earth Fund’s large-scale solutions to climate change and established a messaging foundation for verbalizing and visualizing these tenets on the website in clear and compelling ways.

We wanted to help the Bezos Earth Fund's audience see how everything they do fits together and present them with a fuller picture of the work being done by the Earth Fund and their partners. And make numbers and stats more impactful and easier to grasp by putting them into real-world context.