CauseLabs Resources

Lessons & insights from our journey for positive impact.

A person sits at a desk with their head in their hands, surrounded by color swatches and selection boxes, indicating difficulty making a choice.

Build Accessible Color Palettes

At CauseLabs, we know accessible design shouldn’t be a guessing game. For years designers have relied on contrast checkers that tell you whether a color combination passes or fails accessibility standards (like WCAG’s 4.5:1 contrast ratio for text) because roughly 2.2 billion people experience some type of visual impairment. Our owner, Michael Gillihan, got tired […]

A person holds a globe in their outstretched hand, with North and South America visible, and the persons face blurred in the background.

How do you design websites for a global audience?

At CauseLabs our approach to designing for a global audience begins with listening. Language and culture shape how people interpret content on a page. We study regional behaviors, accessibility needs, and emotional cues before we sketch a layout. We build flexible content systems that support translation, right to left reading, local idioms, and imagery that […]

Portraits of Lise Kingo, Amina J. Mohammed, and Alan Jope.

Leadership for a Global Crisis: Important Lessons & Lived Experiences

The United Nations Global Compact is holding special Academy Sessions centered around #UnitingBusiness. You can view the previous sessions and register for the future ones here. Below are my reflections from the first Academy Session: New Leadership for a Global Crisis. Leadership Starts with an Opportunity Our normal social constructs have disappeared and our day-to-day […]

A prototype drawing session CauseLabs did with DTFA for their website redesign

HCD Course Resources & Improved Virtual Collaborations

On April 14, the CauseLabs team signed up for the free Human Centered Design (HCD) course hosted as a collaboration between Acumen and IDEO.org. If you’d like to sign up for this course, it may still be open for enrollment, but if not, they host it annually and our team takes it as a refresher […]

A man in the dark with light illuminating his face.

Managing Stress in a Global Pandemic

Ah, stress. The effects of stress show up for all of us in different ways, but we all know it well, and we are becoming even more acquainted with it in recent days. How do we manage stress in times like these? What even is it?  For me, it helps to look at some of […]

An antique globe

CauseLabs Proudly Joins the UN Global Compact

Strengthening its commitment to sustainability, CauseLabs formally announced that it became a signatory to the UN Global Compact on August 30, 2019. The Compact is an initiative for companies to align strategies and drive operational awareness around universal principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption and take actions that advance societal goals. The UN […]

CauseLabs Mission Model Canvas worksheet

Part 5 | Working with the Mission Model Canvas

This is the last section of our 5 part guide to the Mission Model Canvas: your business plan cheat sheet. You can read our previous journals here. Previously, we stepped into the shoes of the customer and identified how we will (10) Engage and (11) Reach the customer; next, we budgeted (12) How much it […]

A person's hands writing and a Do Work That Matters coffee mug

Part 4 | Working with the Mission Model Canvas

This is part four of our guide to the Mission Model Canvas: your business plan cheat sheet. Read the first four parts here in our journals. In the previous article, we listed the Key Activities that will (7) Solve the problem; (8) Listed the Key Partners; and identified (9) What we need to test the […]

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