Conservation that found its audience.

The challenge

Tide Foundation had spent fifteen years doing quietly extraordinary work — restoring mangrove forests in the Philippines, tagging endangered reef sharks off Mozambique, building the largest open dataset on plastic accumulation in the Indian Ocean. Their researchers published in Nature. Their field teams were among the best in the world.

None of that was visible on their website. The old site was a dense wall of text organised by internal department structure, with a donation form buried four clicks deep and a homepage that opened with a mission statement last revised in 2014. Online donations had flatlined. Email signups were declining. A younger audience — the one most likely to care, and to give — never stuck around long enough to understand what Tide actually did.

The team knew the problem. They'd commissioned two audits that said the same thing: the brand didn't match the work, and the site didn't earn attention. What they needed was a partner willing to rethink both at once.

Our approach

We started with the story. Tide's work was full of drama — a sunrise census dive, a coastline mapped by drone, a community that went from fishing to farming coral in a single generation. The old site told none of it. So we rebuilt everything around showing the work, not describing the organisation.

• A brand refresh, not a revolution. We kept the wave motif people recognised but redrew it, introduced a warmer palette, and gave the wordmark the weight of an institution rather than a newsletter.
• A donation-first website. The donate button isn't a footer afterthought — it's the clearest action on every page. We reduced the donation flow from four steps to two and let people give without creating an account.
• Storytelling as structure. Each programme got a visual story page — photography-led, with the science written for a curious reader, not a peer reviewer.
• An email capture that offered something. Instead of "join our newsletter," we offered a monthly field report. Signups tripled.

People finally understand what we do. For fifteen years we couldn't explain it in a sentence. Now we don't have to — the site does it for us.

Earning the donation

The hardest design problem on a nonprofit site is the one most sites get wrong: asking for money without making it feel transactional. We studied where people abandoned the old donation flow and rebuilt it around a single principle — show the impact before asking for the commitment.

We also rebuilt the brand's visual language around the colour of the ocean at depth — a deep teal that felt serious without feeling cold, paired with the warm clay accent that signalled hope and sunlight. The photography, much of it shot by Tide's own field teams, finally had a frame worthy of it.

Outcomes

The new site launched ahead of Tide's annual giving campaign — the best possible timing. The results in the first six months exceeded what the team had budgeted for the entire year.