Create an engaging cover for nonprofit story

The Leap Ambassadors Community

The Leap Ambassadors Community is a community of nonprofit thought leaders, progressive funders, policy makers, and instigators who believe that performance matters. Leap Ambassadors come from many different professional roles across philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, but they all believe that high performance must be the norm if we are to make meaningful progress in addressing society’s most challenging problems. We define high performance as the ability to deliver - over a prolonged period of time - meaningful, measurable, and financially sustainable results for the people or causes the organization is in existence to serve. The community’s audacious vision is to trigger a mindshift within a vital core of the social sector to accept that mission and performance are inextricably linked.

The Funding Performance series of profiles promotes and encourages funders willing to support their grantees’ learning and improvement—and open to learning and improving themselves to become better organizations for the people and causes they serve. Each profile tells the story of one funder’s experience and highlights its relationship with one or more of its grantees in their joint pursuit of high performance. This story is the fourth in the series.

The target audience for the Funding Performance series of profiles includes funders such as foundations, high net worth individual donors, grant-making public agencies, and businesses engaged in corporate social responsibility and community investing. The nonprofit sector more broadly may see these profiles, but they are written for and targeted at funders.

The story that this cover accompanies profiles the Weingart Foundation and its slow, steady, patient transformation from a traditional corporate organization to a national leader in social equity and effective philanthropy. It has made this transition thanks to great people - board, executive leadership, and staff - who have backgrounds and values that allow them to truly walk in the shoes of the leaders they’re supporting. They’ve all worked for organizations like the ones they support. And they’re very diverse across every dimension.

The title of the story is “We’ve Walked in Your Shoes”

We prefer interpretive design elements over more literal representations of the story’s concepts.

We also want the visual design to communicate our brand’s personality: Warm, trustworthy, credible, reflective, and personable.

Our design aesthetic can be described as clean, simple, polished, warm, sophisticated without being elitist, and appealing. Take a look at the various products and designs present on leapambassadors.org to gain a sense of our overall aesthetic and feel.

Font package details:
Headers: Droid Serif, serif
Subheads: Droid Sans, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;
Body/Sidebar: Droid Sans, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif;
Pull-Quotes: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', serif

We do have Leap Ambassadors Community brand colors, but we don’t want to limit the cover design to those particular colors at all, as you’ll see in the example designs from the first three covers. The brand colors of The Weingart Foundation, the organization being profiled in this “We’ve Walked in Your Shoes” story, can be seen on their website, http://www.weingartfnd.org/.
Leap Blue: #0D4A62
Leap Green: #E0E27A
Leap Orange: #DC9827
Turquoise: #529D9F
Red: #B42F14
Dark gray: #404041
Medium gray: #808284
Light gray: #BBBDC0

This cover and profile story are the fourth in an ongoing series. You can see the first two here (http://leapambassadors.org/products…ble-trust/) and here (http://leapambassadors.org/products…petus-pef/).

We’d like the branding on the cover (the Funding Performance box at the top and the Leap of Reason Ambassadors Community banner and logo at the bottom) to be the same as in the third story, which you can see here: https://leapambassadors.org/?wpdmdl=13781