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Using Good Design to Promote Good Causes

April 4, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute

Peleg Top and Jonathan Cleveland want to dispel the notion that professional design is a luxury rather than a necessity for charities.

“What nonprofits and cause-based organizations ultimately want is to create change, whether it’s a cure for disease or social change,” says Mr. Top, who, like Mr. Cleveland, is a graphic designer. “Good design has a lot of power in enabling them to affect change at a much higher level and sometimes much quicker.”

To drive their message home, Mr. Top and Mr. Cleveland have written Designing for the Greater Good: The Best in Cause-Related Marketing and Nonprofit Design, a book that features innovative marketing and design work for nonprofit organizations.

The authors’ call for effective charity designs garnered nearly 4,000 submissions from around the world, roughly 10 percent of which are featured in the book. Mr. Top and Mr. Cleveland were so impressed by the quality of the work that they decided to write case studies on two dozen of the campaigns, rather than the 12 they had initially planned.

The two men hope that their book will help raise the bar for designs that promote charitable causes and serve as a resource to show both designers and nonprofit officials what is possible.


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Says Mr. Top: “We’re hoping that we’ll inspire more great work.”

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About the Author

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.