Role: Brand Manager, United Ways of California
Challenge: Our public policy team needed a way to keep supporters and coalition partners informed about active legislation without manually creating graphics from scratch every time a bill’s status changed. Bills move through many stages, including introduction, committee assignment, public comment periods, hearings, and votes, and the team wanted to flag key moments (like an upcoming committee hearing) at multiple points: a week out, three days out, and on the day itself. They also needed a way to tag relevant committee members on social platforms like Bluesky and Instagram to increase visibility and accountability at the right moments.
Solution: I designed a template in Canva that was easy to update, reusable across many different bills, and simple enough for team members without design experience to fill in with the bill name, author, description, and current status. I worked closely with the Senior Communications Manager and the Public Policy team to fine tune the language and pinpoint which stages of a bill’s journey were most important to highlight.
To help our audience follow multiple bills at once, I created a visual system using customizable svg masks created in Illustrator, where each bill we sponsor is assigned its own color from our brand palette, making it easy to track a bill’s story across posts at a glance.
Results: In addition to turning a complex, multi stage legislative process into a clear, recognizable visual story, this system made the request process faster and easier for the Policy team, while giving the Communications team a quicker, more streamlined way to produce each graphic. As an added benefit, the system created a growing archive of ready made graphics and copy that teams can pull from for future communications, like email newsletters.
Tools: Illustrator, Canva, Asana
