Swannanoa Grassroots Alliance is a community-led organization connecting people and resources in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
SGA is a collaboration of neighbors, local nonprofits, businesses, and churches actively working to inform the community and support relief, recovery, and rebuilding efforts in the Swannanoa Valley.
I had the honor of helping to form the organization, but also to design the brand, the website, and create content for social media channels.
Because this brand was created in an active emergency situation, it didn’t exactly follow my typical brand process or logo ideation. At the time this was created I was working off of donated Starlink devices and battery banks with no power, water, and limited cell service. Our immediate goal was to help our community find daily resources like food, water, and medical services.
The brand colors were decided upon based on what t-shirts our local printer had in stock, and also what brand recognition we could build upon from existing local groups within our coalition.
It was important to me that the user experience was the same across all platforms. Most social media accounts offering aid were full of mismatched graphics and tons of information. We had a lot of information to display too, but we were dealing with a population that has been overwhelmed, traumatized, and suffering from a great deal of brain fog and decision fatigue. I didn’t want to add to that problem. I wanted them to find the information they needed easily. So the website and the social channels were set up with the icons below, each one a different page listing locations and times for each resource. I consulted Spanish speaking friends to ask how I could make everything most accessible for Spanish speakers. They do have apps to translate websites, but given the limited internet everyone suggested that I display the Spanish under the English in italics. This not only made the website more accessible, but it also made our brand inclusive and representative of our community. We had a running google document for each resource. Friends from all over the country reached out to help us keep these up to date. We were manually updating the website every morning until my friend, Katie from Rotanz Design coded each page to auto-populate from the google documents. Social media was the same approach, the same icons with the captions updated to display information in real time.
