Designing Conversions: How design leads to effective engagement 🎨

Graphic designers often describe the principles of design as rooted in aesthetic: unity, balance, hierarchy, contrast, scale, repetition, space. That said, these principles can be helpful guidelines or checklists for building effective landing pages, apps, and even campaigns. Unity of messages across all platforms is key, as is the balance of text with images, the contrast of your call-to-action to information, and the scale of various elements on a page. Your CTA should be obvious and engaging, without detracting from the educational material available to supporters who want to join your campaign. Repetition and space can often compete, and balancing the two can be an art form in itself.

Design is constantly evolving, and grassroots campaigners, who often run on shoestring budgets, risk falling behind and not being able to compete in the market for people’s attention. This is where the New/Mode community comes in. From thoughts on principles and practices, to use studies and collaboration, part of New/Mode’s mission is taking the work out of some aspects of your campaigning, so you can get on with amplifying voices and creating change.

That said, there is no single solution that will work for everyone, so we’ve curated a community space where activists and campaigners can share what works for them, inspire others, and perhaps most importantly, share lessons learned and battles won. In our campaign spotlights, you can see how users have leveraged design to create successful campaigns. From striking colours and simple calls-to-action with CostcoExposed, to clear graphics and justification with InsureOurFuture, thoughtful design is critical to campaign success, and better design can lead to better engagement.

The CostcoExposed campaign has extraordinarily striking content on their landing page - the subject that they’re dealing with isn’t pretty and to reflect this, they’ve chosen to focus on grabbing your attention the moment the page loads with striking, strident colours and graphic imagery. It is effective, and it is on the expectation of this effectiveness that they’ve included a simple call-to-action at the first opportunity. Not only is the call-to-action accessible and obvious, their design is as simple as their goal. In this case, a single page design keeps compelling evidence to hand and requires little time for an individual to go from awareness to conviction to action.

How can you design effectively?

Contrasting what is desirable with what is technically viable and economically feasible can inform your content design, your campaign design, and even your landing page design. Starting with design thinking, you can better ensure that everything that follows is on-message, on-brand, and effective. After all, that is the most important thing: effective campaigning and advocacy for sustainable positive change.

Ready to get started, but need a hand?

We get that you’re busy: the digital campaign space changes quickly and crises seemingly pop up on a near daily basis these days. Whether you’re riding solo and wearing multiple hats, or you’re part of a sophisticated team of organizers, you may find yourself simply not having enough time in the day to get your campaigns and actions set up how and when you want.

As part of our Professional Services offerings, our team can support yours with advanced campaign creation and design: professional design and setup of your action and landing page, advanced form setup with custom design and brand matching, and copy creation for actions, letters to target, thank you emails and social sharing.

Sound interesting? Reach out to us at outreach@newmode.net to get started.