Visit the site.

MorePeaceCorps is a grassroots campaign headed by the National Peace Corps Association and M+R Strategic Services to build support for a bigger, better, and bolder Peace Corps. One of the key goals of the campaign is to push for the doubling of the PeaceCorps budget in the next few years.

This project immediately presented a daunting challenge for us: come up with a brand and a fully-functional website in four weeks. A project of this scale, from our previous experience, usually took a good 3-5 months. To have it compressed into a month meant we had to move fast.

We had one face-to-face meeting that we used to outline basic milestones. Afterwards, we went straight to designing concepts. Rather than formal presentations and serious revision rounds, we kept things nimble and asked for quick feedback on our designs. The result was a simple and flexible circular logo that received approval in less than ten days. We only wish all of our branding projects would start and finish so quickly.

We quickly took the logo and put up a teaser site to hint at the website coming soon. But the actual website had us holding our breath. We decided to build it on Expression Engine, a content management system that we had never really used before. Given the site's requirements and what we had read about EE, we felt like we needed to take a chance. Risky move, we know, but after a week of tinkering, we felt comfortable enough to move ahead.

After a couple weeks of nonstop design and coding, we met the deadline and let out a big sigh of relief. The site helped to kick off the campaign, and we were very pleased with how Expression Engine turned out (we've gone on to use it in more projects). In addition to the site launch, we designed the MorePeaceCorps e-newsletter.