Kiva:
Season Campaigns

Collection of some of our best season campaigns for Kiva, an international nonprofit addressing the challenge of financial inclusion from all sides.

Kiva.org is a multinational non-profit organization, know for their work in micro-lending. As of 2020, Kiva made 1.5 billion dollars in loans worldwide, with a successful repayment rate of 96.6%!

Our studio was invited to create a series of campaigns anchored in illustration and photo editing, to highlight the different initiatives that Kiva undertakes every year. These initiatives include special campaigns on immigration, women’s rights, SMBs and support during the COVID crisis.

Branding / Digital & Web / Illustration & Lettering

International Women’s Day

In 2020, Kiva approached our design studio with a brief for International Women’s Day. We built a campaign that grabs the viewer’s attention with 100% percent illustration-based art, a dramatic contrast to the stale campaigns pushed by most non-profits. The illustration style was based on mono-weight strokes and color halftones, to create emotional, evocative portraits of women from all over the world, standing tall, cheerful, radiant.

Along with the illustrations and “waving flag” logo, at its core, the campaign was about showing dignity, emotion and celebration. The color palette of the campaign was simplified to a very restricted palette, on top of which we then peppered multi-color confetti and other celebratory items, to create two distinct levels of reading, and of messaging, in each illustration. The campaign was distributed on all of Kiva channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and a special microsite, reaching millions of people worldwide.

A a need became evident as the COVID-19 pandemic continued in the United States: small business owners all over the nation were struggling to stay open, a distressing situation that had particularly pervasive effect on minority-owned businesses.

Kiva decided to open a new Fund to help SMBs in the United States, and commissioned our studio to create a branding system and illustrations for the Fund. This also included real-life applications, to be distributed among the SMBs that participated in the program.

Keep U.S. Small Businesses Open

World Refugee Day

The design for the World Refugee Day 2020 campaign focused on bringing forward what the experience of forced migration is like by showing stories as they unfold.

The campaign’s illustrations were inspired by graphic novels, with people in active motion, freeze-frames in front of cityscapes that are a combination of sketches and shadows.

We developed several design direction for the logo for the campaign, with the final selection being a clever play of the visual motif of “home”. A full system of original illustrations and animations for social media was also developed.

After the World Refugee Day campaign we worked on a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign had Modern Family’s star Sofia Vergara as its spokesperson, and the goal was to create a cast of illustrated characters representing the different audiences that the Kiva COVID-19 Response Fund was helping: small business owners across the U.S.A., independent workers, freelancers, etc.

We added a visual motif of helping hands, which allowed us to introduce the concept of lenders into the illustration plus a wordmark for the new Fund.

Kiva COVID-19 Fund

In October 2020, Kiva celebrated 15 years of broadening financial inclusion by sharing stories from its community of partners, borrowers, and lenders.

Our studio designed over one hundred and seventy five (175!) digital stickers that their team used to highlight each unique story, with individually-chosen graphic accents.

From dates or financial milestones, to congratulatory messages and illustrations, the campaign presents a universal message of celebration and joy, shared by Kiva’s partners across the world.