For the past 25 years, The Climate Trust has combined market-driven and nature-based solutions to climate change that strengthen land stewardship and leveraged the power of carbon offset markets to conserve America’s forests and grasslands. After a strategic planning process to expand their reach, make markets more accessible, and further champion Black and Indigenous land owners, The Climate Trust asked Constructive to help transform their brand and communications. Together, we translated their new strategic plan into a new brand vision that’s embodied through every expression of and experience with The Climate Trust brand.
For two decades, The Climate Trust has been building relationships with landowners who pledge to conserve their land in perpetuity—and when they do, The Climate Trust sells carbon offsets and hands the revenue right back to landowners. The relationships are solid, but the process is a bit more abstract, especially at first. To understand the brand’s strengths and weaknesses as well as their website’s triumphs and pain points, we created surveys, led workshops, and conducted interviews with key stakeholders. When we did, we learned about the intricacies of their website, its core needs, and goals for engagement. And on their brand, we learned about the real, tangible value that The Climate Trust provides to landowners, offset buyers, and communities’ climate resiliency.
A compelling theory of change is foundational to a nonprofit’s impact—especially when a nonprofit is embarking on a new strategic plan. For The Climate Trust, we learned in our research, interviews, surveys, and workshops that the organization’s greatest strength lies in their ability to leverage the power of carbon markets to do two things: to build a climate resilient future and to unite communities in land stewardship. To accelerate that impact, we charted a brand strategy that understood The Climate Trust as playing a critical role in bridging landowners and carbon markets, as well as bridging rural America and the creation of climate resilient communities.
Building on our research and strategy, we crafted new brand language that strategically positions The Climate Trust for the future with a messaging framework that articulates who they are, what they do, and why it matters with clarity, depth, and detail. The new platform connects “the why”—a new mission statement, vision of impact, and core principles to “the how and with whom”—defining the roles that The Trust plays, its unique strengths and differentiators, and audience relationships. An evolution of The Climate Trust’s rich history, the new brand strategy and messaging provides the foundation for everyone at the organization to channel their passion for the work and embody the ideas and impact that The Climate Trust stands for—uniting stakeholders in a shared vision where good land stewardship and nature-based solutions lead the way to a climate resilient future.
Before our partnership, The Climate Trust’s brand failed to reflect the timelessness that comes with protecting land in perpetuity. To bring The Climate Trust’s new verbal brand principles to life, we created a refreshed visual identity for the organization that emulated the brand’s timelessness, elegance, and organic roots. We created a new hexagonal logo to reflect the structure of carbon, but we did so with rounded edges to give the logo a more natural look. We paid special attention to the imagery for The Climate Trust’s new brand, using real photos of stakeholders to emphasize the organization’s relationships to people and land. The colors and gradients were also nature-inspired and meant to reflect a sunset. To balance authority and urgency, the typeface uses a serif and a condensed, capitalized sans-serif for headlines.
Oftentimes, The Climate Trust is tasked with teaching people who are completely new to carbon markets and land trusts how to navigate the process that the organization facilitates. To design the user experience and underlying system that catered to buyers, landowners, and climate experts alike, we led workshops to identify the different ways the website can help people achieve their goals, then organized dozens of pieces of content to engage them online. The result tells a clear brand narrative of the core programs and values that define The Climate Trust’s work; delivers resources and stories that deepen understanding; and then drives action from landowners and buyers.
With The Climate Trust’s website, we translated our strategy, branding, and UX into an online brand experience to represent the organization’s values, programs, and impact. We started the design process by establishing a new design system that introduces a new system of typography, colors, imagery, and visual elements. Once the system was in place, we applied design concepts and branding elements that set the tone for the brand experience. Working closely with The Climate Trust’s team, we iteratively reviewed and extended our website design in stages, discussing and refining as we built a comprehensive design system of styles, components, and templates that carry throughout the website. Together, we delivered a strongly branded website experience that elevates the organization’s deep commitment to expanding access to carbon market solutions.
The Climate Trust believes that community-led land stewardship and climate action are critical for all of our futures. To make sure that communities can understand and access the tools they needed to advance their climate resiliency, The Climate Trust’s website prioritizes accessible language to describe their work, key impact statistics, case studies, and issue area-specific glossaries. Focusing in three key areas—grasslands, forest management, and reforestation—The Climate Trust brings their theory of change to life through their visually rich hubs under “What We Do” on their website. Throughout, the imagery and brand is meant to demystify, or make clear “what was once smoke and mirrors” according to a landowner.
A core part of The Climate Trust’s new strategic plan included an elevated commitment to working with often marginalized communities, particularly with Indigenous communities in the American West and Black landowners in the South. To demonstrate their commitment and their trustworthiness, The Climate Trust’s website draws on the organization’s existing strong ties to landowners across the country. Our strategic understanding of The Climate Trust as a bridge between landowners and carbon markets played a key role in articulating the organization’s value propositions, process, and potential to landowners. Across the website’s new “Who We Work With” section, we told the story of the partners that make The Climate Trust’s critical work possible.
Carbon markets can be confusing. And to many, they might even signal “green washing,” but The Climate Trust is different. As one of the few nonprofit organizations in the carbon market space, The Climate Trust makes good on its promise to advance land trusts—conserving land in perpetuity—and returns the revenue from the carbon offsets created by trusts back to the land owners. The result is more climate resilient communities, expanded conservation, and a trustworthy force in carbon offset markets. To paint a clear, comprehensible picture of The Climate Trust’s impact, we worked with the organization’s team to create infographics that succinctly demonstrate the cycle of work in turning croplands to protected grasslands, improving forest management, and restoring forest ecosystems.
