The Regulatory Assistance Project is a global coalition of experts who support public and private decision-makers with power sector strategies that accelerate our transition to a clean, reliable, and efficient energy future. RAP partnered with Constructive to create a new website and communications design system to help stakeholders around the globe navigate the complexities of power sector policy, regulation, and markets.
User research indicated content discoverability was one of RAP’s greatest website challenge in meeting the needs of its audience. To engage people with different backgrounds and help them quickly find content of interest, we structured the site experience through the 3 key drivers of RAP’s mission strategy: their breadth and depth of issue expertise, global footprint, and vast library of research. A taxonomy of regions, topics, and content types then encompass the entirety of RAP’s information—providing structure that effectively groups content and provides multiple points of entry and avenues for exploration.
RAP is a global brand that works across multiple sectors representing the energy production, storage, and deliver value chain. Therefore, it’s critical that their research and perspective be respected—particularly within the halls of government around the globe. Our design strategy references the classic, multi-national “universal style” of design. The result is a brand identity that positions RAP to increase their influence with key audiences, while also supporting the content-heavy user experiences it needs to focus audiences on its expert research, analysis, and best practices.
RAP’s knowledge center delivers the research and insights their global audience of experts needs, with advanced search and faceted filtering that make it easy to find the right content.
To advance its global carbon emissions reduction strategy, RAP operates in four continents. As a result, multilingual communications were essential to reaching influential leaders in critical countries across the globe. We developed a multilingual, multi-alphabet design system and digital publishing workflows into RAP’s CMS that supports English, Mandarin, and German, while providing scalability to add new languages in the future.
To accelerate adoption of its ideas, RAP must provide different audiences with context and a deeper understanding of complex issues. They must also offer a clear perspective, actionable recommendations, and best practices capable of facilitating sector and market transitions to clean energy systems. Our editorial design strategy balances delivering quick takes, key statistics and facts with encouraging deep-dive into long-form content—engaging audiences with different levels of expertise so that RAP can more effectively steer important discussions.
Alongside digital engagement, a core part of RAP’s strategy to advance its mission is producing detailed research reports, issue briefs, and presentations for expert audiences working on energy efficiency and climate change around the world. To make producing high-quality knowledge communications easier and more efficient for RAP’s communications team, we created a cohesive design system of styles and templates that provide consistency across the organization’s volumes of long-form, data heavy research.
RAP’s visual rebranding across digital and print communications is supported by brand guidelines that create a flexible design framework to work within. A detailed color and multilingual type system supports RAP’s long-form publishing and data visualizations, while photography guidelines support image sourcing and create brand consistency across stock imagery.
