Design for Social Good

This workbook turns the course into a working method you apply to one real cause. Choose a charity, advocacy issue, or community group now, something you genuinely care about and can learn about, and carry it through every exercise so you finish with a portfolio-ready, impact-led case study rather than abstract notes. Each section maps to one course module, moving from scoping and the single action, through strategy and behavioural framing, to ethical community-centred design, and finally to sustainable delivery and honest measurement.

Set the foundations: choose your cause, scope the work so it stays finishable, and replace vague awareness with one specific, measurable action.

Pick a single real cause you will use for the entire course: a local charity, an advocacy issue, a community group, or a mutual-aid project. It should be something you care about and can learn about, ideally with a real person you could talk to. Answer the prompts before doing anything visual.

Treat your free project with the same discipline as a paid one. Fill in a one-page scope so generous help stays finishable and the organisation knows exactly what it will get and by when. Keep it short enough that a busy non-design staffer would actually read it.

Force a single, measurable action into the brief using the single overriding communications objective. If you cannot complete the sentence, you do not yet have a campaign. This sentence becomes the filter for every later decision.

Build the logic that connects your design to a real result: a theory of change, behavioural framing grounded in evidence, and a one-page brief everyone agrees on.

Draw the unbroken line from your design to the outcome. Fill in each link, then write the assumption that must be true for each arrow to hold. The gap you find is where the project would fail.

Run your one action through the Behavioural Insights Team's EAST levers, then choose your message frame deliberately. The goal is to make the desired action the easy, obvious, well-timed thing to do.

Apply the identifiable-victim effect. People give to one named, pictured person, not to statistics. Plan how to lead with a single human story and let the scale support rather than replace it.

Turn your strategy into a shared contract a non-designer approver can sign off. The most important and most skipped field is the single thought. Get this agreed before anyone falls in love with a colour.

Make the work ethical and effective: involve the affected community, represent people with dignity, and meet real accessibility standards.

Plan how to design with the community, not just for it. Decide how far up the ladder of participation you can climb on this project, and how you will involve real people rather than designing from a stereotype.

Audit your planned imagery and language against the dignity-over-pity standard. Run each image and key phrase through the test before you finalise anything that depicts a real person or community.

Before finalising, show your draft to at least one member of the actual audience and capture what you learn. This single step catches the tone, language, and accessibility problems that are invisible from the inside.

Produce work that survives real constraints: a system a volunteer can run, honest outcome measurement, and an impact-led case study that proves the result.

Design for handover so the organisation can keep producing on-brand work after you leave. Plan the mini brand kit, the locked templates, and the plain-language guide that prevent brand drift and dependency.

Separate reach from real behaviour change and build measurement into the design before launch. Fill this in so you can prove impact, not just count likes, when the campaign is over.

Turn your work on the one cause into a portfolio case study structured as a story of impact. Lead with the result, not the artwork, and carry the same ethics into how you present it that you applied to making it.