The Challenges

SWAN is the Sex Worker's Rights and Advocacy Network of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It currently counts 19 organizations in 16 countries as members. SWAN provides financial, strategic and outreach assistance to its members. In preparation for its presence at the 2010 International AIDS Conference, Parsons Fellow Kelly Nichols assisted the organization in four main areas:

Identity

Web Site

Publication

International AIDS Conference

The Solutions

Identity

Logo
An exploration of SWAN relationship to its members as well as SWAN's positioning amongst other sex worker advocacy NGOs lead to a revamping of its existing logo. To not lose all of SWAN's existing brand equity, the "dancer" graphic was retained. The acronym was set in a more refined and confident typeface and the dancer graphic was streamlined. In order to bolster the visibility of the web site, the SWAN url was included in a variation of the logo. Similarly, in an effort to reinforce the significance of the countries of the region, variations were developed that included each country's name. In addition, some of the member organizations voiced issues with successfully accessing the existing logo across multiple output formats. To address this, the final logo was rendered in a vector format for scalability and a small suite of application-specific files of the final logo was created to distribute amongst member organizations.

Business Cards & Letterhead
Following the aesthetic guidelines of the new logo, the new business cards and letterhead had a much more bold and contemporary look. It was delivered as a Microsoft Word template to be easily used for electronic documents.

Web Site

While there was no dearth of quality content on the site, it was often difficult to sort through and find pertinent information. Categories were expanded and new ones created to house new content types that would be coming in the future. Additionally, Member Organization pages were expanded so that each organization could post their own content and those without a web presence could direct their audiences to their SWAN web page.

Publication

A 70+ page booklet of interviews conducted by Anna-Louise Crago entitled To See Our Power: Sex Workers' Stories of Fighting for their Rights in Central & Eastern Europe and Central Asia was published in both English and Russian. The booklets were printed in a short run and were distributed at the 2010 International AIDS Conference and also available in PDF format on the website.

International AIDS Conference

T-shirts were produced to represent the many SWAN member organizations attending the conference. The slogan "Arrest The Violence! Support Sex Workers' Rights" broadly identified the shirt with sex worker advocacy. A basic, informational flyer was printed that communicated three basic things:

Fundamental purpose and mission of SWAN

Awareness of SWAN's newsletter

Complete list of member organizations' names and contact information for conference attendees

Two, two meter wide vinyl banners were designed to identify the SWAN booth, one for SWAN and one for TASZ/HCLU. Slogans were variations of sex worker "demands".

A couple of days into the conference, it was decided a conference-specific blog would be helpful for SWAN members attending to post their thoughts and reflections.

SWAN members also expressed interest in roleplaying while at the conference to engage passerbys in a manner similar to how sex workers are engaged by real police. A "Sex Badge" was created for SWAN actors who apprehended conference attendees by asking if they had condoms on them. Once the attendees displayed condoms, the "police" actors would find them guilty of prostitution and ticket them. On the ticket, participants were directed to the SWAN website.