Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability
2023
The Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) is the flagship digital sustainability initiative for the United Nations. They host over 1300 members, including 450 cross-sectoral organizations.
CODES is a member-based coalition building the global framework to accelerate digital sustainability. Their mission is to set the global agenda and priorities for advancing a sustainable, digital transformation, and to create opportunities for dialogue through activations in tandem with events such as the UN Environmental Assembly, Web Summit, Stockholm+50, and the Internet Governance Forum.
the challenge
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The CODES website previously consisted of long-form text integrated into a landing page on SparkBlue, a community management system with few options for organizational features or custom branding.
But CODES was poised to scale, and needed a new platform and messaging guidelines to help them get there. The new site would need to accommodate a range of bandwidths, and to convey CODES' mission clearly to those reading it for the very first time.
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Sustainability is a broad field, and sometimes content related to it can get jargon-heavy and dense. This is particularly true when we're dealing with issues related to systemic change and complex, multi-stakeholder engagement. Our biggest challenge was to conduct thorough research through piles of mission-critical content in order to propose the most streamlined, succinct versions of compass content for CODES.
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how we worked
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Our project commenced with full-depth immersion into the world of CODES, and my role was to lead all content strategy, copywriting, and network engagement strategy across the site. The audience is quite literally global, and spans many sectors including corporate, academia, non-profit, and multilateral. As a result, we needed to define a clear, concise user journey to drive conversion into multiple distinct pathways—organized by audience persona.
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To start, I pored over dozens of documents, reports, presentations and webinars, and delved into hundreds of member feed posts in the online CODES community. I complemented this research with a landscape analysis, featuring in-depth interviews with12 key participants and leaders, and an extensive member survey to gather critical insights.
Ultimately, I replayed the various versions of CODES' identity as expressed through their own documentation and anecdotal perceptions. This illuminated points of contention, contradiction, and coalescence. From there, I distilled our recommendation for the most resonant language to take forward as core brand messaging.
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the results
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The final product for CODES was a robust messaging framework, and the full set of content wireframes for their new site. We developed refreshed mission and objective language, winnowed complex information into clear, compelling, conversion-ready language to guide their audiences to join the growing network.
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Since publishing the new site, codes.global, members from over 55 countries have joined the movement. And the urgency of CODES' vital mission is more clear than ever before!
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