Lift to Rise has a bold vision for the future of Coachella Valley: reducing rent burden by 30% through the production of 10,000 units of affordable housing. By convening more than 60 public and private cross-sector partners through their Collaborative Action Network (CAN), they will work together with Coachella Valley residents to bring housing stability and economic opportunity to the region. Swell helped Lift to Rise tell a cohesive story of collective impact through updated branding, a new website, and an all-encompassing media plan.
While Lift to Rise was successful in establishing an effective model to build more housing more quickly, reaching and activiating new audiences to scale the work was tricky. The messaging across Lift to Rise’s channels felt incohesive. From sharing local community event details to dissecting wonky public policies all on the same platforms, the strategic plan lacked focus in their communications.
Buried in a PDF on their website, their 2-year Action Plan was the key to building a successful communications strategy. We brought this document to life and used it as a throughline for communications across platforms in a way that would motivate multiple groups–from residents to developers to politicians and everyone in between.
Our role was to elevate the current brand, providing a more defined hierarchy in typography, a consistent icon system, an expanded color palette, and defined tone/voice to aid in brand recognition, messaging, and polish.
We built a new, accessible platform with relevant information for everyone – from advocacy actions to events to news to donations and more. Rather than burying the Action Plan in a PDF, we created a robust page pulling out key strategies, actions, statistics, and goal progress. And we centered human voices from those most impacted by Lift to Rise's goals with the Stories from Home modules across the site.
Lift to Rise is constantly on the move. The White House, statewide policy roundtables, and local Town Halls are a few spaces where the needs, strategic plan, and future goals of the organization are amplified. For them to communicate effectively, Swell created multiple collateral pieces: an Impact Report (both as a web page and print material), customizable Keynote presentations, petitions, digital invitations, event landing pages, and a digestible one-page Action Plan as well as a long-form Action Plan document for print. Each piece incorporates the new branding, messaging, and diverse audience considerations of the Lift to Rise organization.
To reach audiences at various levels of understanding and engagement, we leaned into a wide array of communication tactics, including first-person narrative videos, animated infographics, social media, digital and traditional advertisements, and newsletters. Based on our discovery research, we knew that it was important to focus on positive messaging–highlighting resident and coalition partner success stories as well as calling attention to progress on Lift to Rise's goals–and centering communications around three main pillars: (1) advocacy, (2) planning, and (3) funding for affordable housing developments and greater economic mobility. We use rich and authentic photography, cross-sector quotes, important statistics, partner spotlights, news highlights, memes, parody and more to convey the Lift to Rise message: when the sun rises, it rises for everyone.
Since partnering with Swell, Lift to Rise’s Facebook pageviews grew 33%, and engagement increased by 56%. The monthly newsletter open rate average is 41%, 10 points higher than the average rate for NPOs.
Even more importantly, however, was the successful bilingual grassroots campaign to secure a $15 million allotment in Governor Newsom’s state budget for the Lift to Rise coalition’s catalyst fund in support of affordable housing production in the region. Swell created a click-to-write campaign to reach members of the budget committee. More than 1,500 members of the Lift to Rise community participated in this action, with a 34% conversion rate from open to completion. This funding will help ensure that Lift to Rise reaches its goal of 10,000 new affordable housing units by 2028.
