The Challenges

KEHPCA believed that its outreach to palliative care providers across Kenya was negatively impacted by its lack of expertise in design and communications. When the Fellow arrived, the communication tools employed by the organization included a newsletter, a brochure, and a web site. KEHPCA staff agreed that the web site was difficult to use; its look and feel needed to be revamped. The brochure was information heavy, as it covered the concept of palliative care as well as the story of the Association and its mission. Flasz saw that in addition to her original assignment to update these materials and the NGO’s brand identity, she would need to work with KEHPCA to expand into additional communication formats to reach the full spectrum of its stakeholders.

KEHPCA encompasses palliative care organizations in the inner city and the deepest countryside. The NGO serves patients and their families, healthcare professionals, aid workers, donors, and government ministries and agencies. How could the communications strategy be varied enough to speak to all the groups under KEHPCA’s umbrella? On a more intimate level Flasz questioned why the organization had not represented the human side of its work in its communications. Both graphic and content alternatives would need to be considered and vetted to make KEHPCA media more welcoming and representative of all the individuals the organization encompassed and served.

The Solutions

Flasz worked with the staff to review the Association’s brand identity by updating the logo, site, and brochure. The logo was updated to project a more personal aesthetic (the black line became gray, and a difficult to read slogan was omitted). To ease navigation on the site, content categories were assigned different colors and weights of type, and main links were grouped and reduced to the minimum number. Images became more prominent to convey the diversity of Kenyans involved. The back end was also rebuilt, replacing Joomla with Wordpress, which allows KEHPCA to update images, videos, and text as well as affording slide-show photo galleries, archives for posts, quick editing, page configuration, and many other options, and offers an e-newsletter template that is easy to update on a regular basis.

Flasz also revised the design of the former KEHPCA brochure and published it as two separate pieces – one brochure introduces the Association, its mission, vision, objectives, and goals, and provides a form for donations. The second KEHPCA brochure follows the same layout to introduce and explore the concept of palliative care. Staff training was also an important aspect of Flasz’ fellowship that allowed KEHPCA staff members to continue and build on the efforts that Flasz has started.