Leading the way toward a zero carbon future, Yarra Energy Foundation (YEF) supports residents, businesses and local governments, across Australia, to rapidly reduce emissions. To meet its ambitious objectives, the YEF needed a chance to re-introduce itself to the world.

Raising the uptake of renewable energy in Yarra and beyond is a considerable challenge. Overcoming environmental communication fatigue, ensuring clarity of purpose and services, and cutting through in the burgeoning sustainability market is tough. Ellis Jones recommended a new visual identity and website that would reflect the unique YEF essence, and help raise engagement with all on a journey towards sustainability.

To re-design YEF’s website and visual identity, our team dove deeply into the organisation, its purpose, services, audiences and competitors. The resulting user experience (UX) analysis clearly outlined the organisation’s goals, their audience, and how to create a user experience that would appeal to them. From this analysis, Ellis Jones identified key website elements to improve, including:

• UX: intuitive design guiding different audiences (residents, businesses, councils) to the content they need, quickly.
• Content hierarchy: structured to enable users to easily find the information, service or action they want.
• Content: ensuring practical answers in simple language and YEF’s impact is well defined and inspires.
• Calls-to-action: clear and consistent calls-to-action across the site to drive action.

A new visual identity expresses mission and personality: energetic and bold, professional but grounded in community. A unique tone of voice, reflecting a social focus and business minded approach, can be heard across website content and other activations.

Our digital team incorporated SEO recommendations for content ensuring the website was optimised from day one.  Once the site was designed, and architecture and functionality defined, we worked with developers, Bone Digital, to bring it to life.

YEF’s new website beautifully reflects who the organisation is and where it wants to go. You feel the community spirit and the impact focus: and you trust the quality of service on offer. It has dramatically changed the way YEF engages with its audiences and meets their needs. The simple and engaging nature of the language used to talk about energy (often, a difficult topic to understand) is easy to grasp for energy consumers and businesses alike.

The new visual identity redefines the organisation as contemporary, energetic and grassroots. It reflects YEF’s personality and mission and succeeds in building credibility amongst stakeholders.

Looking to the future, YEF has a powerful platform from which to grow its impact and raise the uptake of renewable energy projects across Australia.

Working with YEF was a reminder of the value we can create in bringing the science of communication and content, digital marketing and digital design together, in an area we are passionate about.