People-Powered Democracy

commoncause.org

Common Cause

Founded with 4,000 core members in 1970 to serve as a people’s lobby, Common Cause is now a national, nonpartisan, grassroots network of more than 1 million members and supporters.

Holding power accountable

Common Cause is a nonpartisan, grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy. They work to create open, honest, and accountable government that serves the public interest, promote equal rights, opportunity, and representation for all, and empower all people to make their voices heard in the political process.

Wide Eye partnered with Common Cause to help guide the update of their nearly 50-year-old brand and to overhaul their entire digital presence and program.

New Era, New Look

We sought to create an action-oriented platform focused on openness, trust, and solutions-oriented pragmatism for supporters of varying political backgrounds. Furthermore, our design decisions had to work sustainably not just for Common Cause national, but across a small army of 26 State groups in both print and digital mediums. Our iterative style tile process ultimately established a typographic-heavy approach that employs a combination of a strong sans-serif (Halyard Display) for calls to action and value statements, and an authoritative, classic serif (Eskorte Latin) for the organization’s editorial content. An expanded color palette communicates the vibrant diversity of both Common Cause’s mission and membership. Our creative process culminated in the design of 20+ different web templates to accommodate a broad swath of both existing content and new types of content.


Our Impact: a history of Common Cause

Strengthening democracy 27 websites at a time

Following an ample discovery and content strategy phase, Common Cause and Wide Eye established a plan to build a fully-featured national website integrating brand new CRM tools (Action Network) for both their c3 and c4, and, ambitiously, to rollout updated websites for each of their 26 state offices — all simultaneously. Our project management and strategy team doubled down on organization, triaging challenges that came up, and crafting an effective plan to get us to launch. We communicated with Common Cause’s digital team extensively via Asana, provided templates for all required content using GatherContent, carefully outlined permissions for CMS access, and worked with our technology partner Pantheon to establish an engineering setup that is both malleable and robust. Our development team built a WordPress multisite based on a highly-customized, modular frontend and backend. We created a React-based web app for looking up legislators via zip code and programmatically migrated old content from Common Cause’s previous CMS.

...and the kitchen sink

The final product is a powerful new tool for Common Cause national and their state organizations: content-rich and modular, but never busy or confusing.

  • 20+ templates
  • Highly-integrated CRM
  • Interactive maps
  • Social feeds
  • Lightboxes & alert bars
  • React-based legislative lookup
  • Taxonomic filtering
  • Content migration

...and the kitchen sink

The final product is a powerful new tool for Common Cause national and their state organizations: content-rich and modular, but never busy or confusing.

  • 20+ templates
  • Highly-integrated CRM
  • Interactive maps
  • Social feeds
  • Lightboxes & alert bars
  • React-based legislative lookup
  • Taxonomic filtering
  • Content migration

"What stood out to us about Wide Eye Creative was their combination of technical ability, sharp design sense, and deep experience working with social change organizations. We chose Wide Eye Creative out of a large and very competitive pool of top-notch digital agencies for our flagship website, a mission-critical project. We were not disappointed. Our website is faster, more mobile friendly, and better represents our brand and work. As a “citizens’ lobby” I love how Wide Eye Creative helped us weave in compelling calls to action that help the public become involved in our work, seamlessly integrating our digital advocacy platform into the website. Our staff are able to easily update the sections of the site they are responsible for, something critical in an organization that has multiple content authors and editors."

Jesse Littlewood, Director, Digital / Common Cause

A huge success

Common Cause and Wide Eye launched all 27 websites right on schedule in April 2018.

Since the initial launch, we’ve been working with Common Cause on an ongoing-basis to improve their online program and to meet new goals together. We collaborated in Summer 2018 to design and build the Our Democracy 2018 microsite to survey electoral candidates and get them on the record on common sense democracy solutions.

In August 2018, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to numerous charges including a campaign finance violation brought by Common Cause in an FEC & DOJ complaint. Their work has never been more important.

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