Designers Take Creative Approaches to Promoting Charitable Causes

When the Center for Women in Transition, in Holland, Mich., wanted to create a new brochure for donors, it sought to reflect in a sensitive way the hardships faced by women and children affected by domestic and sexual violence. “We’ve all heard people say, ‘Well, if he ever hit me, I’d leave.’ But it doesn’t happen like that,” says Beth Smith, who interviewed several of the center’s clients in order to feature their stories in the brochure. “It doesn’t happen in an instant. We wanted to show that it’s a process.”

The result was intended to educate the charity’s donors who might not understand the systematic nature of abuse. Ms. Smith works as a copywriter for Fairly Painless Advertising, an advertising agency also in Holland that designed the center’s brochure. The agency’s compassionate approach played an important role in establishing the good rapport necessary to work with the center and its clients.

Chris Cook, owner of Fairly Painless, says that throughout the design process the agency was careful to acknowledge the women’s hesitancy to be identified in public as victims of abuse. “We had to assure them that we weren’t going to depict them in an insensitive light, but rather as beacons of hope and examples of success in their own lives, showing how the center helped facilitate that,” says Mr. Cook.

The brochure uses black-and-white photography as a key design element, portraying women of diverse ages and ethnicities, to demonstrate how widespread abuse is. All of the women photographed have benefited from the center’s services, and the brochure features excerpts of their real-life stories.

“We all have notions of who abused people are, but we wanted to show that there’s not a single demographic that fits this profile,” says Mr. Cook.

Roz Neinhuis, development coordinator at the Center for Women in Transition, credits the brochure with increasing the resources available to the organization.

Attendance at its most recent annual fund-raising event, which raised $67,000, increased 50 percent over the previous year, she says, which helped pay off the shelter’s mortgage. In addition, the visibility gained from the brochure helped expand the center’s volunteer rolls by 15 percent.

Thanks to the brochure, she says, “people want to be a part of our efforts and help us, because they perceive us as being aggressive, businesslike, and winners in the community.”

Busting Stereotypes

The brochure was featured in Print magazine’s latest Regional Design Annual, which recognizes the best design nationwide in advertising, promotional materials, illustration, and other categories.

Other charities featured in the Regional Design Annual have also had to overcome common misconceptions about the causes they support.

The Arc of Colorado, in Greenwood Village, worked with Sukle Advertising, in Denver, to produce a campaign that encourages society to change its assumptions about the people it serves — children and adults who are mentally retarded.

The campaign, which is still running in the state, features five advertisements, each of which includes a portrait of a young person with a mental disability and a caption, such as “I’m different. I want a small wedding,” and “I’m different. Most 23-year-olds don’t own their own home.”

Bill Baesman, executive director of the organization, says the charity’s increased visibility has helped it gain 48 new donors, many of them families of people with mental disabilities.

The images, which were displayed statewide on bus shelters and billboards, in movie theaters and in print, engage the viewer with close-up photographs meant to communicate the confidence of people with disabilities traditionally ignored in the news media. Mike Sukle, creative director of the agency that bears his name, says the campaign aimed to show that “developmental disability is just a part of the great diversity that exists in the human race, no different than having red or blond hair.”