Platform for Progress
Introducing Patronicity’s new Theory of Change, Brand Guide, and Website Redesign.
This blog is the first in a new series, Platform for Progress, featuring what our team is developing to improve your experience working with Patronicity. Each quarter, we’ll publish new features and tools we’ve developed to empower crowdfunding success and build vibrant communities.
Since our founding, Patronicity has been mission and impact-driven. Recently, we have taken strides to further our commitment to our mission and enhance our brand and platform, informed by our recent partnerships in the mission and vision-aligned spaces of small business and climate justice.
Over the past two years, we’ve developed our Theory of Change, updated our brand guidelines, and redesigned our website. We are excited to share more insights about the process and highlight the key improvements we’ve made to our brand and website.
Theory of Change
In 2023, we developed our Theory of Change, which defines who we are, what we do, the outcomes of our work, and the long-term impact we aim to achieve.
The process helped us to clarify our mission, refine our vision, define and communicate our values, expand our definition of building vibrant communities, specify the outcomes of our work, and realize our impact. Most importantly, developing our Theory of Change helped us to reaffirm our commitment to building vibrant communities.
Our Mission
We use civic crowdfunding to build vibrant communities, connecting changemakers with funding partners to support community-led projects.
Our Vision
Revolutionize development by democratizing the funding, planning, and implementation process.
Transform communities by harnessing the power of crowdfunding and crowdgranting.
Empower changemakers to create more sustainable, healthier, and equitable communities.
Our Values
Accessibility | Equity | Inclusivity | Trust | Transparency | Technology
Our six core values serve as the foundation of our people-first philosophy. Together, they reflect our commitment to building community and creating opportunity, leveraging technology to amplify impact.
Focus Areas
While placemaking remains central to our mission, we’ve expanded our focus areas to include small businesses and climate justice over the past several years. This evolution reflects our strong partnerships with organizations such as Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation and Sustainable CT, which champion small business success and sustainability.
Our Theory of Change will guide our team in realizing and measuring our impact as we move forward.
Brand Guidelines
We recognized the importance of updating our brand guidelines to reflect our values and emphasize the vibrancy that our platform helps to create.
We identified that our prior color palette did not meet accessibility standards. This palette rippled throughout our brand channels and platform, resulting in an inadequate user experience.
We prioritized developing a cohesive brand, retaining our existing logo design, and updating our color palette to make our brand assets more accessible.
We engaged Mariah Knight, a freelance art director and graphic designer, to develop updated brand guidelines, including a fresh color palette and custom icons. With her support, we updated our logo, created a color palette with accessible color pairings, designed a series of two-color icons to describe our work visually, and emphasized colorful, bold photography or active public spaces to highlight the vibrancy our changemakers create.
We finalized our brand guidelines in spring 2023.
Website Redesign
After updating our brand, it was time to apply the design elements to our website. Our priorities were similar to those outlined for our updated brand guidelines: improving the overall appearance of our brand, increasing accessibility, and enhancing user experience.
Information Architecture
We've restructured our website with new pages and content to showcase who we are and what we do. We’ve added a Services page to provide a high-level overview of our service offerings. We’ve added a Crowdfunding page, providing a definition of crowdfunding and why we believe in it. We’ve added a Crowdgranting page, defining our unique model and highlighting its impact since our founding in 2013. We’ve made it easier to view our grant programs with a dynamic Grant Programs page, allowing you to sort active and past programs with ease. This is just a brief look into our changes, and we encourage you to explore all we offer on our new website!
Accessibility
Our redesign emphasized improving accessibility. The process of updating our website began with a detailed website audit, including using WAVE’s web accessibility evaluation tool to identify areas for improvement. We implemented our new brand colors using our accessible color pairings, increasing color contrast. We primarily use san serif fonts and left-justified text. We’ve added alternative text to images. We’ve reduced the number of pop-up windows. This is just a brief overview of the changes we’ve made to increase accessibility, and we will continue to make changes to improve the website for all users.
User Experience
We believe in crowdfunding because it’s accessible–but only as accessible as the website itself. The changes we’ve made to information architecture and accessibility contribute to a stronger user experience for all users.
There’s More to Come
Areas of our user interface are still being updated with our new branding. Users will continue to see changes implemented over the coming months. We’ll keep you updated with quarterly progress reports on our blog.
A special thank you to everyone who contributed to bringing these updates to fruition. This has been a collaborative effort over the past several years, and we greatly appreciate all team members and consultants who have contributed to crafting this new vision.
