Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) is a migrant farmworker advocacy organization based in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in 1992, SAF works with students, community members, and migrant farmworkers to work towards a more just agricultural system.

 

In 2010, SAF asked me to re-evaluate its communications strategy from head to toe and to rebuild its website.

 

We commenced with a weeklong visit to Durham to meet with SAF's Community Engagement Committee, Board of Directors, and staff. I observed a number of SAF events, interviewed representatives of SAF's partner organizations, and gathered information on SAF's processes and communications. I returned to Toronto with armfuls of SAF materials for my own reference and to pass to like-minded groups in Canada.

 

Working closely with SAF's Assistant Director, Joanna Welborn, we developed a set of recommendations for a practical, high-impact communications strategy. The final strategy included an analysis of SAF's constituencies and how SAF communicates with those constituencies through a range of media, including in-person engagements, printed material, news media, email, its website, social media, mobile devices, radio, and more.

As an immediate follow-up to the communications strategy, I refined SAF's visual identity, developing SAF's first visual identity manual. We retained the wordmark SAF has used almost since its founding, but established a set of compositional rules and selected a set of fonts to reflect SAF's identity as a youthful, but respected organization.

 

Finally, integrating the preceding elements, I re-architected, designed, and built SAF's new website, integrating Drupal's powerful internationalization and localization capabilities with custom views, webforms, and a friendly, clear design showcasing SAF's rich collection of documentary photography.