Bezos Earth Fund Website

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. 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.

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. On their preliminary site, the Earth Fund emphasized that there is “no silver bullet” for solving climate change. It’s a complex puzzle involving many moving parts. In stakeholder interviews and an in-depth discovery workshop, we dug deeper into these concepts and homed in on the innovative approaches the Earth Fund and their grantees are deploying to successfully address climate change. Taking what we learned from our interviews and research, 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.

Tonally, the Earth Fund wanted to balance a realistic view of the current state of our planet with a forward-thinking, daring vision for a better future. With all this in mind, we selected colors inspired by nature that were brighter and more optimistic than the Earth Fund’s existing palette that was cooler and darker. For design layouts, we wanted to help their audience see how all the pieces fit together and present them with a fuller picture of the work being done by the Earth Fund and their partners. And to make numbers and stats more impactful and easier to grasp by putting them into real-world context.