A Web Strategy For A Community Organization Born From Resilience

Our Client: Resilient Red Hook

Our Team: Chloe Dahan (Design Lead), Roshni Ganesh (Strategy Lead), Mariel Go (Account Manager), Sisira Mondreti (Project Manager)

Our Timeline: February – May 2026 (14 weeks)

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The Client: A Community Organization Born From Resilience 

Resilient Red Hook (RRH) is a nonprofit, community-led volunteer organization based in the neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was originally formed by community members selected by the Governor’s office in response to Hurricane Sandy under the name “New York Rising” to develop resiliency plans. In 2017, the organization transitioned into Resilient Red Hook, expanding its mission beyond the scope of the state-funded disaster recovery plan to advocate for and address broader environmental and social vulnerabilities facing Red Hook.

Since its inception, RRH has worked closely with the city on major infrastructure initiatives while also independently advocating for and researching soft infrastructure solutions. Despite consistently being at the forefront of advocacy for resiliency efforts in Red Hook, RRH’s contributions have not always been formally recognized or visibly attributed, limiting broader public awareness of its involvement and impact.

Beyond its advocacy and project-based work, RRH plays a critical role as a neighborhood convener, fostering partnerships with local community organizations and facilitating collective action. The organization is also actively seeking grant funding to support its ongoing and future initiatives. 

The Goal: Transition the Website From A Recovery-Focused Narrative to An Action-Oriented & Community-Led Platform

Although the organization has been working to transition its efforts from post-Hurricane Sandy recovery to broader resiliency issues over the past few years, the previous website did not reflect its transformation. The content and design was outdated, undermining their current projects, advocacy efforts, partnerships, and forward-looking vision centered around the Red Hook Climate Justice Action Plan (CJAP). There was also a lack of calls to action for getting involved with the organization, as well as for learning about the organization and their work.

Thus, we came up with several objectives for the website’s redesign:

1. Update the content and design to reflect the current state and work of the organization.
2. Prioritize action-oriented outreach and activation of community members. 
3. Promote advocacy through providing accessible and actionable information related to issues surrounding the community.
4. Bring an aspect of storytelling to the website in order to highlight RRH’s extensive work to encourage engagement inside and outside of the community.

The Result: A Website That Reflects an Organization’s Story

Before

After

Exploratory Research: Understanding Red Hook, RRH, and the Community Around It

To better understand Resilient Red Hook’s digital presence, community perception, and engagement challenges, we conducted a combination of desk research, field research, and interviews across both online and physical community touchpoints.

Desk Research

We began with Desk Research to better understand RRH’s current digital ecosystem, communication patterns, and organizational positioning. This included reviewing existing literature, analyzing peer organizations through a Competitive Analysis, and evaluating the usability and structure of the current website experience through a Heuristic Evaluation.

Field Research

To ground our understanding in the local context, we conducted Field Research across the Red Hook neighborhood to observe the physical, social, and environmental context in which RRH operates, gaining a grounded understanding of the community.

Interviews

Finally, we conducted 8 semi-structured interviews with residents, members, and partners to understand perceptions of RRH and RRH’s website, exploring how users interpret the organization’s messaging, what information they seek, and what would motivate them to take action through the website.

By the end, we weren’t just empathizing with RRH’s challenges: we aimed to understand them as best we could. That understanding, more than empathy, shaped every strategic decision that followed and grounded a redesign built to serve the organization’s specific needs.

What effective climate storytelling looks like?

To understand what effective storytelling/content strategy can look like, we conducted a community audit (reframed from a competitive audit), reviewing 12 climate and resilience-focused organizations’ websites to identify narrative patterns RRH can utilize for its own website. Storytelling beats statistics on climate sites.

Community Audit Themes:

• Origin Story as Anchor
  • Before we tell you what we do, we tell you why we exist. RRH has a powerful origin story in, but the site doesn’t tell it to its fullest extent.
• Progress Made Visible
  • Map impact so progress feels live and tangible. RRH has no status indicators, no timeline, and no visual record of what’s been accomplished.
• Urgency Paired with Agency
  • Lead with what’s at stake, but always follow with what someone can do about it, so the takeaway is momentum, not helplessness.
• Transparency as Storytelling
  • Showing where resources go, what kind of work is happening, and what’s still in progress builds trust.

Affinity Mapping: Identifying Patterns Across Research

We synthesized findings from interviews, field observations, heuristic and competitive audits, and literature reviews through affinity mapping to uncover recurring patterns, communication gaps, and opportunities for deeper community engagement.

Key Insights: What the Research Revealed

Insight 1

There is a significant gap in community awareness, as people aren’t aware of the website or RRH’s initiatives. There is a need for community outreach and marketing efforts, both on the website and beyond.

Findings

• Field research showed that there isn’t much visible presence throughout the neighborhood. There are no flyers/QR codes talking about RRH in areas where RRH has relevance. 
• The community does not understand what RRH’s role is in the community

Quotes

“People who are involved with Resilient Red Hook, or who have been on the board, understand, but I don’t think that the general community in Red Hook understands.”

“The homepage needs a one-liner on what this group does.”

“They [RRH] are lowkey…they need to do more tabling events, or more branding, or maybe the social media has to be much more robust and engaged?”

Insight 2

The website functions as a document repository, not a storytelling platform. There is no clear distinction between past, present, and future work, and the content relies on planning jargon that the community might not share.

Findings

• Resources link exclusively to off-site PDFs, some of which are broken or inaccessible, hosted on Dropbox, with titles written at a professional/planning reading level (e.g., “Durst Sunset LLC”), offering no summary of what the document contains or why a resident would need it.

Quotes

“I would use it almost just like instead of going to the Google Drive… it was just easier for me to go here and pull up something.”

“It feels like a repository for existing members or someone with context.”

“It should show a trajectory… it doesn’t show all the advocacy.”

Insight 3

The user experience of the current website feels tailored to those actively engaged with the organization, leaving a lack of entry points for those looking to get involved. As a result, there isn’t a conversion from visitation to engagement.

Findings

• Most people are brought in by meetings or through existing networks.
• There is a need to serve different audiences through different entry points.
• Multiple mentions of involvement pathways, but there are no clear ways for people to get involved.

Quotes

“The site needs to show we are engaging rather than just saying.”

“The site is informational but not mobilizing.”

“What does it look like to be a member? Who do they want? I can’t see that on the website…”

These key insights helped reveal how the website could better reflect the lived energy, advocacy, and community-centered nature of RRH’s work, while directly informing the platform’s content structure, messaging strategy, and pathways for engagement.

Strategic Direction: Bridging Awareness, Engagement, and Community Action

The path to strengthening resilience is through unlocking community engagement through the website.

By redesigning the current RRH website into a community-first platform, the experience can better embody the energy of an active, community-led organization while supporting ongoing participation, contribution, and shared ownership of resilience efforts. 

Rather than functioning solely as a static repository of information, the redesigned platform becomes a more visible, accessible, and engaging space that reflects the lived, evolving, and community-centered nature of RRH’s work.

The website now becomes:

• A scalable outreach and organizing tool, it was always meant to be,
• A bridge between curiosity and participation,
• And importantly, a front door into RRH’s work, initiatives, and the broader Red Hook community ecosystem.

Design Principles

1. Lead with the Origin Story
   • Grounding the narrative in how RRH began, why the work matters, and how the organization has evolved over time, creating a compelling connection between past efforts, present initiatives, and future community impact.
2. Make Participation Obvious & Actionable
   • Showing clear ways for community members to get involved across different roles, interests, and capacities through action-forward prompts such as: Join · Attend · Volunteer · Partner · Collaborate · Contribute.
3. Make Progress Visible, Collective & Actionable
   • Group individual initiatives under the larger projects, programs, or community efforts they contribute to, while using thematic tags such as Water, Land, Housing, and more, alongside status markers like Concept · In Progress · Completed · Lessons Learned to communicate progress, connections, and collective impact.
   • Highlight the partners, collaborators, and community members involved across projects.

Sitemap

With a clearer strategic direction established, we restructured the website’s information architecture to better reflect RRH’s current identity and the needs of its diverse audience, from first-time visitors to long-term partners and funders.

The previous site’s structure was organized around documents and past recovery efforts, making it difficult for new visitors to understand what RRH does today or how to get involved. The redesigned sitemap consolidates the site into six primary navigation items: Home, Who We Are, Our Work, Events, Resources, and Get Involved.

Content Mapping

The sitemap told us where pages should live. The content mapping process told us what should live inside them and why.

As a team, we built out a working spreadsheet to map every existing piece of content across the site against the new structure. For each item, we logged where it would live, what tags applied, whether it was still active, and what role it played in the larger narrative. The exercise forced us to articulate the rationale behind what content to carry into our redesign. 

Meeting with RRH to map the content together

To get the decisions right, we sat down with RRH for a dedicated content mapping session. The meeting did two things at once: 

• It surfaced context we couldn’t have gotten from the site alone, and 
• It directly shaped how we approached the design

A few of the shifts that came out of that conversation:

Resource Means Something Different In Community Context

The original ‘Resources’ page consisted of 119 offsite links, primarily Dropbox PDFs of reports, research, studies, and graphics about Red Hook. There was no description, no context, and no signal that this was research material rather than something a community member could actually use. We came in assuming the long list of offsite documents was a maintenance problem to solve.

Four patterns from our research shaped the redesign.

1. First, our community audit surfaced how peer organizations use the word resource not as a synonym for “document,” but as something tangible the community can draw on (e.g., services, programs, contacts).
2. Second, stakeholders described the existing site as functioning like a Google Drive. As one stakeholder mentioned, going to the resources listing on the current version of the site was “easier than going to the Drive itself.”
3. Third, the resource titles themselves leaned on planning jargon and area-specific language (“A Preservation Plan for Red Hook, Brooklyn / GSAPP Columbia HP Studio, 2009,” “HRA Coastal Flood Protection”), making a long, undifferentiated list even harder to parse for anyone outside that planning context.
4. Fourth, our content mapping session with RRH reframed what we’d been treating as a content problem. The documents weren’t an archive; they were evidence. They reflected how thoroughly Red Hook has been studied, and how much research already exists about the neighborhood. RRH wanted that breadth visible, not buried.

Rather than fighting these patterns, we leaned into them. The redesigned Resources page now covers community resources people can actually use, while a separate Research Library routes visitors to the consolidated Drive of reports, studies, and graphics RRH has organized about Red Hook. One side answers what can I do? The other answers: what’s been studied? Both are legitimate visitor needs, and both deserve their own surface. The split gives users a real view into the breadth of research happening in and about the neighborhood without confronting them with 119 individual off-site links. And it gives RRH an easier system to maintain, since the research itself lives off-site.

Initiatives Aren’t Sequential, They’re Interconnected

Our initial approach to Our Work used status indicators on every initiative card — Concept · In Progress · Completed · Lessons Learned. The logic seemed sound: the original site gave no signal that the work was active, and status pills are a clean way to fix that. But the content mapping session with RRH surfaced a different framing.

Three insights from that conversation reshaped the design.

1. First, status felt static. A pill that says “In Progress” answers the question is this still happening? — but it doesn’t answer the more interesting question, what is this part of?
2. Second, status often couldn’t be applied cleanly. RRH’s work doesn’t fall into one pattern. Some initiatives are continuous, ongoing efforts with no end date. Others were time-bound projects with a specific deliverable — a report, a plan, a study — produced through the initiative and then carried into the next phase of advocacy. A single status label couldn’t honestly describe either type, let alone both.
3. Third, RRH proposed a different system. Rather than status, they suggested tagging each initiative with the larger project it’s associated with. Anything related to the Brooklyn Marine Terminal carries a BMT tag. Anything tied to the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery carries a GOSR tag. The tag isn’t a snapshot of progress — it’s a map of relationships.

We leaned into RRH’s framing. The tagging system became the structural logic behind the final filter and tag system on Our Work — making the relationships between initiatives visible in a way status pills couldn’t. Users browsing the page now see not just what RRH is working on, but how the work connects.

Wireframing: Four Approaches, One Consolidated Direction

Once the sitemap was set, each team member individually sketched their own approach to every page in the new IA. After sketching a page, we would come together to walk through each version, and pick what was part working from each one. This allowed us to consolidate the strongest approach into a single set of wireframes (one screen per page).

This let us quickly brainstorm each layout against the design principles before committing to any one direction. 

Co-Design Workshop: Bringing RRH & the Community Into The Design Process

With a basic first version of the site built, we ran a co-design workshop with RRH volunteers and community members. The goal was to understand how the people close to the work would describe it themselves. We aimed to understand what language they used, how they prioritized information, what felt right, and what didn’t.

The format: walk through Squarespace drafts of each page together, with sticky-note exercises around each screen. We asked participants to:

• React to the language and copy: what felt true to RRH, what felt like consultant-speak, what needed to change
• Prioritize what should appear first on each page
• Test if each of the pages are able to do their part
• Brainstorm how to convey key ideas: what would they tell a neighbor to make them care?

What We Heard

• Workshop participants liked this prompt “What is Resilience?” but wanted it framed differently. They wanted to see this question answered by Resilient Red Hook specifically.
• Several suggested moving it to the About / Who We Are page rather than the homepage, and reframing the homepage section as “This Is Our Community”
  • making the page about the people, not the concept.
• Mention CJAP
  • The Climate Justice Action Plan needed more prominence on the homepage. 
  • We added a dedicated section with the six focus areas.
• Re-emphasize that all our team members are volunteers
• Use featured events instead of a calendar on the homepage
  • We created a featured-event section that highlighted any upcoming event, also linking to the full Events page

Reiterating with this feedback, we made structural changes, not just copy changes.

Branding: Matching The Vibe Of The Organization 

Alongside the IA and content work, we refreshed RRH’s visual system to match the evolved identity:  

Final Designs

Our design strategy started with our design principles 

1. Lead with the Origin Story
   • The redesigned about/who we are page centers around a narrative of how RRH began, their mission statement, and how the organization has evolved over time, creating a compelling connection between past efforts, present initiatives, and future community impact.

2. Make Participation Obvious & Actionable
   • The new get involved page highlights clear ways for community members to get involved across different roles, interests, and capacities through action-forward prompts, pictures, and descriptions.

3. Make Progress Visible, Collective & Actionable
   • The redesigned initiative page puts this principle into practice at the individual project level. Each page follows a fixed three-part structure, Why It Matters, What’s Being Done, and How We’re Involved, giving every initiative a consistent, readable format that makes RRH’s role and progress immediately clear to any visitor. A category label at the top connects the initiative back to the broader “Our Work” page, while project tags like GOSR show which larger projects each initiative is tied to.

The Deliverables

At the end of the project, we presented a final deck to RRH to summarize our work and walk through the website redesign on Squarespace.

We also provided them with design documentation that will help guide future website contributors through the Squarespace site, with the understanding that they won’t necessarily have the technical or design expertise to confidently perform certain updates or maintenance tasks.

Based on findings that we gathered through research and design work, we also recommended the following next steps to ensure that the redesigned website continues to reflect the organization’s mission:

1. Continue working on adding and refining key pieces of content
2. Determine the best path forward for website maintenance
3. Audit their wealth of resources
4. Increase their physical presence in the community

Reactions From Resilient Red Hook

“I just want to tell you guys there was points where you talked and the way you said things made me want to cry, so it really feels so amazing also to be heard and seen and understood in a way that you guys did such a deep dive and understood the challenges, especially as volunteers, were constantly in the thick of the work, and it’s sometimes hard to communicate everything that we’re doing, and also see it from the outside so that we can tell the story of what’s been… what is happening in Red Hook, and so I think you guys did an amazing job understanding from all aspects…And I think that really translated in a lot of parts of the design.”

– RRH’s interim chair reacting to our final presentation

Throughout our entire time working together, RRH has shown enthusiasm and appreciation towards our work, especially as we’ve gotten to understand them more through our extensive research. The RRH members that we’ve had the opportunity to talk with continuously emphasized that the Red Hook community is underserved, overstudied, and thus fatigued. By acknowledging that throughout our entire process, even beyond the redesign, the RRH members felt heard. They were excited to have a much-needed refresh for their website, especially one that better reflected their evolving mission and plans for enhanced community engagement.

Final Reflections From Our Team

Our team was honored to be able to work with an organization that continues to advocate for all aspects of its community despite a looming feeling of fatigue. Each RRH member we spoke with was clearly passionate about the organization’s mission, and it was truly inspiring to get to learn about their vision.

This entire project really drove home for us the importance of truly getting to know the people, their environment, and their histories. Although at times we found ourselves uncovering complicated stories and interactions that we couldn’t necessarily fix, it was through these nuances that we were able to paint a more whole picture of the community and imagine a clearer path forward with the redesign.

We’re excited to see the future role that the redesigned website will play in RRH’s growth and Red Hook’s resilience!