Overview

Women in Global Health (WGH) advances gender equity and women’s leadership in health. The movement runs through 65 chapters worldwide, each with its own local goals and culture, all working toward the same mission. After 10 years of advocacy, WGH needed a brand and a website that could hold that scale without losing what made each chapter distinct.

The challenge

WGH’s brand hadn’t kept pace with the movement’s expansion.

The chapters had no shared voice. Sixty-five teams across dozens of countries were representing WGH in their own way, with no common language to tie the work together. The people applying the brand day to day were mostly doctors, nurses, and advocates, not designers, and the existing guidelines assumed a level of design knowledge most users didn’t have.

The site’s information architecture hadn’t kept up with 10 years of content. Pages had grown in an ad hoc way rather than around a clear hierarchy with no consistent structure between them. Navigation paths didn’t match how people actually looked for things, which meant visitors hit dead ends and WGH’s own advocates struggled to find or update their own material.

The real challenge was getting 65 chapters, each with a legitimate claim to their own identity, to recognise themselves in one brand. As one WGH team member put it during the interview phase:

“We need to be able to demonstrate that we are who we say we are, that we are doing what we say we are doing, and that we are actually moving forward towards our goals.”

That line became the test for everything that followed: would a brand decision hold up across 65 different chapter cultures?

Defining the story

We started by defining the brand story, through stakeholder interviews, a brand audit, and a landscape audit against organisations like UN Women and the International Confederation of Midwives. The audit showed a positioning problem: WGH’s language overlapped heavily with peer organisations already established in the same space, a clear signal that differentiation needed to come from something other than mission statements. The stakeholder interviews supplied that: a sense of community and mutual support that no competitor could claim in the same way. One WGH team member put it plainly:

“We have so much to do, don’t have a huge budget, influence, but an amazing community of women who takes time to support you.”

This made the core of the brand clear: a community that shows up for each other.

Creating the brand

The logo needed to work as both a symbol of a global movement and a mark 65 chapters would want to use on their chapter materials. We kept the circle and the expansion-line arrows from the original mark, since both were already carrying meaning WGH’s audience recognised, and rebuilt everything around them for longevity: removing the gradient that failed in print and thickening the linework so it held up at social-media sizes. Chapter-name lockups let every chapter carry the identical system with its own name attached, so the mark could replicate for all countries without fragmenting.

Colour and type carried the same logic. The palette kept WGH’s 2 core colours, lifting them slightly for better contrast, and built out a broad range of secondary colours representing the diverse community within the organisation and its many chapters.

Spline Sans became the primary typeface for its balance of print and screen legibility, and Noto Sans was added as a secondary typeface so chapters communicating in scripts outside the Latin alphabet, Arabic, Hebrew, and others among the world’s writing systems, could use the brand without it breaking down at the level of language.

Migrating 10 years of advocacy web content

The site had to represent all 65 chapters clearly through one central platform, and stay usable as more chapters and content got added over time. A big part of that was a chapter map for navigation: as the content team adds a new chapter page, the map updates automatically, so the site never falls out of sync with the movement it’s tracking. The migration itself carried a decade of content forward: 800 individual content items, including 88 pages and 400+ posts across 6 custom post types, and over 1,500 media assets, all reorganised rather than just moved.

Alongside the migration, we built 2 new features. The Speakers Bureau: a searchable, filterable directory of trained speakers by country and language, with a request flow built in, so an event organiser doesn’t need to email WGH directly to find the right person. She Leads: Stories of Change is a hub for women-led initiatives, collecting field stories gathered by chapter members and stories of chapters themselves, showing how women are changing healthcare on the ground.

Outcomes

For an organisation like WGH, the real measure isn’t clicks, it’s whether 65 chapters recognise themselves in one brand, and whether the people funding and partnering with the movement trust what they see.

“The rebranding process was a moment of renewal for the organisation, not simply a technical exercise. [The CREATED team] helped us articulate an identity that is both true to our mission and aspirational in its vision. Moving from a fragile and outdated structure to a robust, modern, and user-centred platform has given WGH the digital home it deserves.”

— Dr Magda Robalo, MD, MSc, Executive Director, Women in Global Health

The work translated into measurable scale across the brand, the site, and the content behind it:

• A single brand system shared across all 65 chapters
• 800 individual content items migrated to the new site, including 88 pages and 400+ posts across 6 custom post types
• Over 1,500 media assets carried across from the old site to the new one
• 2 new site features launched alongside the migration: the Speakers Bureau directory and the She Leads storytelling hub