Global Justice Ecology Project: Redefining a mission statement

This project, conducted through TechFleet, involved a multi-phase overhaul of the Global Justice Ecology Project’s (GJEP) website, focusing on improving content clarity, consistency, and user engagement. I specifically contributed to Phases 1.5 and 2, working closely with a cross-functional team to revamp key content areas as a Lead UX Writer managing 3 apprentices.

Overview

The Global Justice Equality Project (GJEP) is an environmental advocacy nonprofit helping to create equitable living conditions for vulnerable populations, especially indigenous populations throughout Latin America. On this project through TechFleet, I was the Co-Lead of the UX Writing team. After enjoying UX writing and content design on previous projects, I wanted to try a deeper dive into this area of UX. This project also combined my expertise of nonprofits and human rights issues with design knowledge, as well as previous cross-functional team building and leading.

GJEP was already working with TechFleet to overhaul their website entirely. All TechFleet projects are sprint-based involving 3-4 sprints over a period of 8 weeks. This project went beyond the normal time period, lasting 12 weeks, and we picked up where Phase 1 left off. This project involved heavy cross-functional collaboration between the client, UX designers, UX researchers, product strategists, and project managers. My role as a Co-UX Writing Lead required me to manage three apprentices while ensuring that the UX writing and other content aligned with the broader goals set by the UXD, UXR, and PS teams. I was also responsible for planning and leading meetings, and presenting during design reviews with the client.

I will focus on the main issue addressed which was refining the GJEP mission statement. Other areas worked on are detailed in the appendix. 

Despite being around for over 20 years, GJEP’s original mission statement didn’t seem to match the work they were doing in practice, making it difficult for users to grasp GJEP’s core purpose. The UX Writing and Research teams in Phase 1 had already done some preliminary research and testing of the existing mission statement and content on the website, as summarized below. The main topic we knew we needed to clarify what it was GJEP was doing which was step one.

In order to craft a new mission statement, I created some prompts and helped lead the team through a few questions:

  • If you have 15 seconds to summarize GJEP, how would you summarize it?

  • What is a key accomplishment from the past few years that gives GJEP credibility?

  • What does credibility look like for GJEP? What impression should this statement leave on a visitor?

  • How is GJEP accomplishing their mission with a practical example? 

As a team, we collaboratively worked on some first options on our FigJam for testing with GJEP’s approval. Our hope was to see which direction made sense to users in terms of language: should it be bold, should it be inspiring, should it be dark to make someone want to take action, should the language be neutral. 

Redefining a Mission

Original Mission Statement

Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) explores and exposes the intertwined root causes of social injustice, ecological destruction, and economic domination.

GJEP envisions a world in which all societies are justly and equitably governed with full participation by an engaged and informed populace living in harmony with the natural world and one another.

We accomplish our mission by (1) prioritizing campaigns that are key leverage points for advancing systemic change, and (2) linking struggles and strengthening diverse movements with strategic action, information, and analysis.

Version 1 Statements for Testing

  1. For over 20 years, GJEP has been at the forefront of protecting forests and defending human rights. We build global alliances to tackle environmental, social, and economic injustices, amplifying the voices of land defenders and historically marginalized communities. Our unwavering commitment to systemic change and our hard-hitting, no-compromise approach ensure that we remain a powerful force for a just and sustainable world.

  2. GJEP fights to protect forests and champion human rights. Through global alliances and a holistic perspective, we strive to remain at the forefront of change, as a force to be reckoned with, shaping a future where environmental integrity and social justice thrive.

  3. GJEP has worked for over 20 years to amplify the voices of marginalized communities to protect their environments and human rights. By building alliances between these communities and policymakers, GJEP promotes lasting solutions rather than false promises.

  4. Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) stands at the forefront of protecting forests and defending human rights by amplyifying the voices of historically marginalized people and land defenders. GJEP helps these communities forge global alliances, fostering innovative solutions that forcefully address environmental and social injustice.”

Testing Results and Iteration

There was not exactly one clear frontrunner that emerged from testing, but it did give us a better direction on just what was confusing users. While we were successful in solving the problem of defining GJEP’s purpose and message, it opened up other considerations because users found it to be unclear on what the some of the language meant:

  • Who is being marginalized?

  • What are the global alliances and how do they work?

  • What root causes are they trying to find?

  • The expected outcomes, goals and methods were unclear, so users were skeptical on how they can support the organization or how the organization was even helping communities.

While an intriguing problem, we decided to do one more round of modifications since we were unfortunately time-limited due to the nature of the project. We left the project off with one statement for the Phase 3 project group to test first:

Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP) has been a relentless force for over 20 years, protecting forests and defending human rights by amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and land defenders. Through building global alliances and fostering systemic solutions, GJEP addresses environmental, social, and economic injustices with a no-compromise approach. Together, we shape a just and sustainable future where environmental integrity and social equity thrive.

Throughout the 4 month project, there were some pretty significant challenges. The biggest challenge we had to navigate was a lack of engagement by the client. Another important challenge that turned into an important lesson for my team was that UX Writing and Content Strategy are some of the last pieces of the puzzle being put in when working on an end-to-end project like this. What that resulted in for my team was working on tight deadlines and not having enough time to react to design and research decisions that happened. It definitely taught our team that we needed to be quicker to react and more proactive when it came to content. The main takeaway from this problem was that time management on an agile project like this needs to be anticipated and we should have proactively addressed some issues sooner.

Challenges and Constraints

Recommendations and Lessons Learned

Content improvements such as the work on the mission statement is going to be gradually implemented on GJEP’s website. There were some challenges and major lessons learned and I see this as a positive growth project.

The most important challenge that turned into an important lesson for my team was that UX Writing and Content Strategy are some of the last pieces of the puzzle being added when working on an end-to-end project like this. What that resulted in for my team was working on tight deadlines and not having enough time to react to design and research decisions that were happening concurrently. It definitely taught our team that we needed to be quicker to react and more proactive when it came to content. The main takeaway from this problem was that time management on an agile project like this needs to be anticipated and we should have proactively addressed some issues sooner.

In future phases, I hope the research and UX Writing teams focus on securing client feedback early in the process, especiallyds on critical content like the mission statement. Another round of user testing would have been really beneficial for our team to have been able to compare the original mission statement to the final one we produced.

Appendix

Phase 1 Summary of Research Findings

Other Areas Examined

In order to understand what we were dealing with, we began by conducting a thorough content inventory to identify outdated, redundant, and unclear content. This inventory was crucial for understanding the scope of the content that needed rewriting or reorganization. GJEP has 20 years of content that needs to be addressed. A full content audit is needed, but this is not something that could be accomplished in one sprint. 

I ran reports through Semrush and they have almost 1000 unique pages that needed to be examined which was not possible during this project unfortunately. Because of the limited timeframe of the project, we focused our inventory on the key pages that UX Design was working on, including pages on Mission and Values, Staff and Board Member Biographies, Get Involved/Take action, Donate, and Issues page. We found that the content on the website was inconsistent, long, and not results-driven which matched the limited time spent on each page with users dropping off quickly. For example, “Take Action” leads to a petition that takes you to an external site. Results of previous petitions were never displayed, an issue that also came up when the Research team was interviewing users. Knowing the limitations of the content, and in order to help GJEP improve their website, we turned our focus to the mission statement and value proposition statements which could be evaluated, tested, and iterated on during the limited scope of this project.

Other areas I would have liked to had more time on: 

  • Doing a content analysis: I didn’t get access to Google Analytics which would have really helped me define how well some pages were doing more effectively than Semrush

  • Working with GJEP on a content template to use moving forward:

    • This is important because the Research team found that users consistently had a hard time understanding what they were reading or how the various articles aligned with GJEP’s mission

    • There was room for serious content strategy sessions but no time for that. Because I’m not an ecological expert, I found it difficult and a little frustrating to not be able to go deeper into this subject to really help them define their content. 

    • With 1000 pages, they should have some similar format so the user can be familiar with what they are looking at, even if all of the articles are by different people

  • Redefining their media and “Take Action” prompts

    • Take action for GJEP as was on their website really meant filling out petitions with no updates after the petition was up. Their podcast was great, so focusing more on that and less on long articles that weren’t getting much traction seemed to be a better fit for GJEP’s content overall. 

    • Some blog posts were just links to other websites with a few sentences as to why someone should read that. Having a dedicated section within each of their main focus areas for external work would make more sense so they can highlight their original articles written for GJEP instead of articles from a random website they thought were interesting.