While often viewed through the lens of nonprofit communications, impact reports are more than just an exercise in visual and verbal storytelling. They also serve a vital purpose in supporting nonprofit leadership in mission implementation by demonstrating accountability, fostering transparency, and connecting stakeholders to a nonprofit’s arc of change. As with nonprofit annual reports, impact reports are a key brand touchpoint that strengthens relationships with everyone—from funders to strategic partners—by reminding people why they believe in an organization’s mission and inspiring greater support by demonstrating progress and connecting to tangible outcomes.
It’s with this thinking in mind that the leadership of CARESTAR Foundation reached out to Constructive to create their first-ever impact report at a pivotal time in their history. Following six years of learning and growth advancing racial equity and community-led action, CARESTAR was ready to share what had been learned and accomplished along the way and to communicate its vision and strategy for the future.
Founded in 2017, CARESTAR is a systems change philanthropy that partners with community-based organizations across California to re-imagine emergency and pre-hospital medical care so that it is more equitable, integrated, responsive, and centered on equity. With an approach rooted in trust-based philanthropy, the healthcare foundation employs both grassroots and grasstops strategies to advocate for changes that are informed by and respond to the true needs of Californians and then codified into policies that advance innovation in community-centered care.
Narrative Strategy: Crafting a Story That Elevates Brand Values
When creating an impact report, there are three key components in telling a story that successfully communicates this impact: proven strategies, substantiating statistics, and community-driven stories. To quickly uncover these essential perspectives and center our storytelling strategy on them, we began with a staple of Constructive’s research and discovery process: the Learning Conversation. This critical step in stakeholder engagement is a facilitated dialogue that makes space for each person involved in a project to share their unique perspectives. By fostering open dialogue, it helps clarify the project’s goals, value, and definition of success, ensuring a shared understanding among all stakeholders.
Through our conversations with Tanir Ami, CARESTAR’s Chief Executive Officer, and Linda Wendel, CARESTAR’s Head of Marketing Communications, Constructive’s strategy team narrowed focus on who the priority audiences were for the impact report, defined the meaningful goals and outcomes the report could generate to support CARESTAR’s mission, and shaped our narrative strategy. Not surprisingly, what continuously kept rising to the top of the conversation as the focal point for the project were CARESTAR’s four brand values: Equity, Compassion, Unity, and Hope.
By building the narrative structure of CARESTAR’s impact report to the organization’s core values, we laid the foundation for connecting every brand storytelling element—focus areas, grantee stories, research, and resources—to establish strategic content pillars that tangibly demonstrate the learnings and results of CARESTAR’s first six years. This looked like:
Equity is the foundation of CARESTAR’s work and is woven throughout. To make this idea more quantitative and tangible, impact statistics and references to funded studies set the stage for meaningful conversations about systemic change in California’s emergency response system.
Compassion is connected to the Foundation’s operational strategy through CARESTAR’s approach to trust-based philanthropy and grantmaking, reinforced with testimonials from grantees to demonstrate the screen of values through which CARESTAR collaborates with its community partners.
Unity is reflected in CARESTAR’s systems approach, a core value that’s lived through the Foundation’s network of community partnerships with grantees—and amplified each year through its annual partner summit, celebrating the collaborative efforts that drive meaningful progress.
Hope is the core value that carries CARESTAR’s narrative strategy forward, closing out the philanthropy’s vision for the future with a moment of reflection and encouraging readers to consider their role in advancing equity within the EMS and pre-hospital care systems.
With these four strategic pillars, CARESTAR’s narrative strategy connects to both the head and the heart, uniting quantitative and qualitative storytelling through a combination of impact statistics, storytelling, and philanthropic strategy that paints a complete picture of the current state of pre-hospital and emergency care in California—and how CARESTAR and its community partners are advancing equity and improving outcomes to improve the healthcare system.
UX Design: Walking Audiences Through CARESTAR’s Six-Year Journey
We then turned our focus to designing the framework for how audiences would engage with CARESTAR’s narrative, using a UX design strategy that’s familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling on a social media platform—and is highly effective for keeping audiences engaged online. A linear, single-page experience reduces friction and progressively delivers CARESTAR’s story through compact pieces of content that keep users engaged.
Needing to walk audiences through a six-year journey from inception to impact, we structured content as a progressive, guided narrative that effortlessly delivers CARESTAR’s originating ideas, their learnings and impact, the voices of their grantee partners, and their collective vision for the future.
When it comes to the reach, visibility, and impact of nonprofit communications, digital-first annual reports create significant advantages over PDF and print reports. They are easily accessible on any device, flexibly adapting to any screen size to engage audiences wherever they are. They are more findable by search engines, especially when best practices in SEO are used to target valuable keywords. And they provide measurable insights into performance and content engagement when integrated with Google Analytics and behavioral analytics platforms like Crazy Egg.
This being said, there are still stakeholders who prefer a PDF or printed impact report and it’s important to make sure that they’re engaged effectively as well. So, while directing most of our time and effort towards designing a standout interactive experience for CARESTAR’s impact report, we added a companion print/PDF version that makes a tangible impression on important audiences at in-person meetings and events.
Visual Design: Expanding the Brand’s Visual Language for Greater Impact
Designing their first impact report also provided a significant opportunity to evolve and expand the branding to change how it was seen. With CARESTAR’s logo and core orange and blue palette as our foundation, we transformed the Foundation’s branding with a new visual language that’s more vibrant, engaging, and nuanced—just like their grantees and network of community partners.
A new palette of bright, complementary colors adds vitality and expresses CARESTAR’s optimism. A new serif typeface, Ivar, perfectly complements the precision of the brand’s geometric sans-serif, Avenir, adding a more human element and making long-form content more readable. And background textures add depth and emotion to CARESTAR’s branding and activate the Foundation’s library of field photography.
Adding it All Up: Tangible Results and Impact
Six years in the making, CARESTAR’s impact report combines strategic storytelling, engaging design, and authentic imagery, creating an asset and resource to engage stakeholders, authentically represent CARESTAR’s mission, and inspire community-led action. Once ready, we partnered with CARESTAR to make the most of publishing their first impact report, executing a lean, multi-channel marketing strategy to raise awareness and drive engagement through email and social media.
As Linda Wendel, Head of Marketing Communications, explains, “When it came out, we unveiled it as an opportunity to get to know CARESTAR. It includes not just what we did in the year prior, but it showcases what we’re all about, while being centered around our values. Publishing this report was our first huge public-facing document, and so I certainly noticed a big jump in engagement on the website and social media—and it’s nice when you put something out into the world that you know people enjoy.”
The report didn’t just resonate with their audience—it earned praise from their board as well. As Linda explains, “The report was super well-received by the board. They love seeing all of our work put into one place that they could point to as they talk to people about their involvement with CARESTAR and who we are as an organization. Websites are nice, but you still need to visit 5 or 6 different pages to see the complete picture of who we are and what we do. Our impact report condenses this even more for people who want to hear and see our story in one succinct experience.”
Want to see for yourself? See CARESTAR Foundation’s Impact Report. Or, if you’re curious, explore more of Constructive’s strategy and design work with healthcare and health equity nonprofits.
