Educare Learning Network

Educare transforms thousands of young children’s lives nationwide. They work to ensure every family has equitable access to quality early care and education, partnering with historically disinvested communities to promote positive outcomes for generations to come. 

Since 2000, Educare has grown from a single school in Chicago to 25 schools across the country. Through partnership and innovation around practice, policy and research, they continue to advance the quality of early education in America. Now, it was time to advance their website as a main resource for community, partners and families to turn to.

When it came to re-strategizing the website, the primary challenge we faced was this: no two communities are the same. The resources they need, their cultural and societal contexts, and their paths to success are as unique as each child they serve. Until this point, the site had been catered to supporting new school openings – something that a one-size-fits-all was not going to support.

With that, our goal was to empower a broader range of collaborators within each of their unique communities. 

Our approach was to create a central resource that could adapt to the range of communities that Educare serves. We reshaped the content strategy to address all primary groups involved with early education: the families, early childhood education providers, policy makers, and advocacy groups. 

Practice, policy, and research are at the core of Educare’s early education philosophy, so we built these key themes into the foundation across all content and storytelling. With these three pillars as a guiding principle, we were able to distill years of nuanced expertise into content that was both digestible and useful. 

We created a website that reflected Educare’s impact and growth – and one that would be able to evolve with them for years to come. With that, we refreshed their existing brand to support a more vibrant and dynamic story centered around the concept of scale. 

The art direction concept aims to tell a story of scale – from a local to national level. Educare schools are rooted within their local communities but the practice, policy and research produced creates impact on a national scale. The visual design supports this idea through rich media and bold typography, and we looked for opportunities to mix images of people with data. We created spaces to tell individual stories and share how those outcomes can be multiplied. 

The result is a modern, use-intuitive site that will serve Educare and its communities, even as they continue to grow and scale their impact in early childhood education.

A standard practice at Briteweb is to ensure the websites we create meet WCAG AA accessibility standards. These standards are implemented throughout our visual design, content management and WordPress development best practices. For Educare, we refreshed their existing colour palette to meet AAA colour contrast ratios, and we also updated their brand fonts to ensure readability and easy access for staff to utilize these font options within all marketing materials.