Jesuit Social Services
Building flourishing communities of justice.
A system to deliver transformative social change and provide crucial support services for people experiencing disadvantage.
Building a just society means creating opportunities for everyone. For people experiencing the criminal justice system; for people recently impacted by the system; and for people impacted by crime. For children born into a home that has experienced sustained disadvantage. For the young mother who needs skills, education, and employment opportunities to support her child. For the person seeking asylum from a war-torn country.
As an organisation striving for profound social change, Jesuit Social Services delivers vital supports for all of these people and communities, and many, many more. Each year, the team supports over 10,000 people directly, while connecting with 160,000 others through broader initiatives to build communities of justice. Their activity is crucial and all-encompassing: from service delivery and support to advocacy, research, policy design, and more. The multifaceted nature of Jesuit Social Services’ approach requires sophisticated website, content production, and marketing tools—to support human flourishing for every person, in every place, in every way.
The problem
The inequalities in our society are systemic, layered, and complex. To inspire transformative change across housing, education, social welfare, employment, justice, gender equality, and more Jesuit Social Services delivers impact through service delivery, research, policy submissions, and advocacy. It’s a sophisticated response to substantial challenges with many moving parts: every arm of activity has distinct needs, context and requirements.
The approach
To support their multi-layered approach to building communities of justice, Jesuit Social Services built a system that combines flexibility—given the differing and unique requirements of their various initiatives—with clarity, to ensure a wide range of audiences can easily engage the organisation in the way that best meets their objectives. To achieve this, Jesuit Social Services engaged a thorough program of stakeholder engagement, rebranding, and product development.
The end-game
Better opportunities for people, professionals, and governments to make the positive transformative change needed to build communities of justice. By investing in significantly improved tooling and processes, Jesuit Social Services is equipped to deliver a more equitable future for every person in Australia. This is achieved through delivering huge flexibility for individual programs, internal stakeholders and specific departments, while ensuring a cohesive system that delivers widespread benefits for the entire organisation.
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
Jesuit Social Services’ mission is simple: go where the need is greatest to inspire and support human flourishing. Unsurprisingly, there are many people and specialist perspectives involved in delivering on this mission.
Jesuit Social Services is active on many fronts that can perpetuate disadvantage: access to housing, education, training and employment, lobbying for policy overhaul, and more. Each stream of activity is unique, with multiple teams and programs within Jesuit Social Services working to drive change.
The first challenge? Bring these many programs together under one cohesive banner, all with distinct requirements, and some with unique sub-brands and separate websites.
CONNECTING WITH STAKEHOLDERS
Stakeholder engagement is key to build a website product and marketing tool that supports this vast array of sophisticated considerations and requirements.
To connect with stakeholders and canvas their priorities, Jesuit Social Services engaged in a series of facilitated workshops with participants from all around Australia. With the right approach, these workshops are the most efficient, effective way to navigate the complexity of multiple layers of programs and initiatives, while ensuring the needs of every internal team are reflected in the end result. You can learn more about Jesuit Social Services’ approach to stakeholder engagement here.
DESIGN TO MEET DIVERSE NEEDS
Engaging stakeholders is vital. But Jesuit Social Services recognise that connecting with people is the absolute priority: from people seeking support to the federal government.
The content is designed to support every person on their own terms. Using a ‘no wrong door’ approach to information design means Jesuit Social Services can create multiple pathways to the same piece of content. There’s no single, prescriptive path to material or supports. You’ll find what you need in whichever way it most makes sense to you.
For Jesuit Social Services, it’s not enough to provide intuitive and accessible information. People need to see themselves in the potential for positive change.
ACCESSIBILITY FOR EVERYONE
Jesuit Social Services supports every person to meet and exceed their potential, in all kinds of ways. To do that meaningfully, the team needs to support a range of culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
The team incorporated many features to emphasise accessibility. This includes both technical accessibility (where the product is built to provide an equitable experience for people regardless of their abilities or preferences for using assistive technologies) and conceptual accessibility (where the product is easy to engage with, regardless of your understanding of Jesuit Social Services or their service offerings).
The site offers content in multiple languages, including Arabic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrinya, Tibetan, and Vietnamese. The Jesuits’ team carefully selected diverse photography of program participants for inclusive representation, and to help people connect with relevant services. Beyond photography, the design system also includes bespoke illustrations to help communicate key concepts visually.
HIGHLIGHTING REAL IMPACT
Jesus Social Services is all about impact. Creating a tangible benefit in society by positively influencing peoples’ lives.
To highlight that crucial influence, the site features bold impact statements and statistics embedded throughout content. It also highlights real stories of people the organisation has supported to flourish. While this type of content is important for prospective funding and collaborative research opportunities, the real value is conveying that Jesuit Social Services create genuine change for people experiencing disadvantage and those who need support.
“Our work involves influencing to shift hearts and minds, to influence the systems and structures that perpetuate poverty inequality, and disadvantage.”
– Julie Edwards, CEO, Jesuit Social Services.
TOOLS TO INSPIRE CHANGE
Advocacy is all about giving a voice—or ideally, many voices—to those who need one. For Jesuit Social Services, those voices come to fruition as different content types that are published and promoted to Government, researchers, service providers, and the broader community.
Service and program pages. Long-form, detailed research reports. Policy submissions. Events. Editorial articles and media releases. In order to enact meaningful influence, Jesuit Social Services is active on many fronts, publishing and promoting many different content types. A comprehensive design system and a flexible modular approach to the site’s architecture ensures the team has every tool they need to support people experiencing disadvantage, advocate for change, and build a just society.
Equally, they’re all scalable and accommodate evolving content requirements. By creating a flexible palette of building blocks that can be selected as needed—and implementing helpful guardrails to ensure everything is implemented cohesively—every piece of content can be curated by team members without the need for design or development skills.
SUPPORTING SOPHISTICATED INTERNAL GOVERNANCE
To provide an additional level of flexibility and governance, the Jesuit Social Services team is in the process of building individual program sites within the overarching content management system.
It’s an effective approach for organisations with complex internal governance structures, like those with multiple distinctive business units, those with international presence, or charities that operate in a federated model.
FACING SIMILAR CHALLENGES?
If you’re on the cusp of an equally sophisticated challenge spanning stakeholder engagement, complex internal governance, extensive polyformat content, and branding considerations, we’re here to help.
In projects at this scale and with this many moving parts, it’s all about reducing—or removing—risk. By drawing on the expertise of a proven partner with a strong track record in these types of projects, Jesuit Social Services can focus solely on their mission: building flourishing communities of justice and a more equitable Australia.
If you’ve got a similar challenge and a similar requirement to remove risk, give us a call.