BAY AREA NONPROFIT WEBSITE DESIGN
Designing a destination for reliable news
San José Spotlight is the city’s first nonprofit digital news organization. They are independent, community-funded, and dedicated to covering the area’s biggest issues without bias. In 2018, their founders came to us with just a name and a mission. They needed an agency partner to help build their brand and ultimately, a news site that our community can trust.
With little funding to start, they simply couldn’t afford our services. But, we believed in their vision and wanted to contribute to our area’s first resource for nonprofit news.
- Logo
- Tagline
- Brand Guidelines
- Pitch Deck
- Marketing Collateral
- Social Media Campaign
- Strategy & Engagement Plan
- Website Design & Development
SJ Spotlight’s biggest obstacle is the rising distrust of mass media. Their brand must exude innovation and ethics to become our community’s go-to source for reliable news.
Under our Design in Kind program, we created Spotlight’s logo and brand outreach materials they needed to secure funding, pro-bono. We also offered a substantial discount on the design and development of their website.
It’s in the details.
We created Spotlight’s brand to appear both editorial and timeless. We balanced traditional and modern design elements to stand strong in a market of established mastheads. The logo mark (a magnifying glass) and the tagline both speak to the “search for truth” that fuels their mission. Every detail of their brand–typography, color, layout, iconography, etc.– helps project an image of trust that sets them apart from other local news sources. Photography is particularly crucial in establishing authenticity and helps San Jose Spotlight look relevant and honest.
You have captured our vision perfectly and we’re so grateful to your talented team for building our beautiful brand. Design in Mind was incredibly responsive, professional, creative, and diligent in supporting us each step of the way—even after our launch.”
We took a phased approach.
Our relationship with the Spotlight team was highly collaborative. That enabled us to balance their immediate priorities against long-term brand goals. We started with the primary brand development work. Then, we pivoted to create a temporary landing page to support their ongoing fundraising efforts. This page helped generate buzz by building brand awareness, promoting events, and enticing new donors. Meanwhile, their team had time to write content while ours designed an infrastructure for the news.
When San Jose Spotlight finally launched, we had gone through several review cycles. This ensured the site would support a wide range of content, their growing staff of writers, and thousands of visitors a day. Throughout production, our team also supported their ongoing promotional efforts, chiming in as brand consultants. Cumulatively, we built an incredible foundation as their agency partner for years to come.
How do you measure success?
Since its launch in 2019, San Jose Spotlight has celebrated incredible growth.
In just the first two years, they achieved the following:
7.5M
new readers
17.6M
page views
44K+
comments from the community
7K+
readers per day
3K+
donors
$2.3M
donated
Without a doubt, our success as a new nonprofit in Silicon Valley would not be possible without Design in Mind! Choosing them to create our brand was one of the best decisions we made and we’ll continue to turn to them as our organization expands and grows.
