Climate Action with Commons.earth

Commons Earth is a climate action organisation funding environmental projects worldwide. They needed a website that could present complex climate data in a way that moved people — and institutional funders — to action. We built a narrative-first Webflow site that turns carbon metrics, hectares protected, and biodiversity gains into compelling stories with clear calls to action.

Climate organisations face a unique communication challenge: their work is data-rich but emotionally abstract. Commons Earth's old site was a collection of dense reports, academic language, and disconnected donation pages. Visitors couldn't quickly understand what the organisation did, why it mattered, or where their money would go. The site wasn't just failing to convert — it was actively obscuring the urgency of the mission.

They were also preparing to pitch major institutional funders, and they knew their digital presence would be scrutinised. A climate action platform asking for serious investment needs a site that communicates rigour, transparency, and measurable impact. The old site communicated none of those things convincingly.

We designed a scrolling impact timeline as the homepage's centrepiece. Each scroll section pairs a key climate metric — tonnes of carbon sequestered, hectares of rainforest protected, species monitored — with the corresponding Commons Earth project, connecting the abstract numbers to the real communities and ecosystems they represent. Visual hierarchy does the heavy lifting: data visualisations sit alongside project photography so the numbers always have human context.

The project directory was the most technically involved piece. Each funded initiative gets a structured CMS page with location mapping, funding stages, impact metrics with dynamic progress bars, and partner attribution. We built the CMS schema so the team can add new projects with standardised data fields — the design layer handles consistent rendering regardless of which fields are populated. A corporate style guide system keeps every page and template on-brand as the team scales their content.

The impact timeline has become Commons Earth's primary fundraising tool — it's the page they send to institutional donors and the one that gets shared most on social media. The CMS cut their content publishing cycle from days to hours. A new funded project goes from announcement to live on the site in under 30 minutes, with consistent branding, accurate data, and proper partner attribution — all handled by the communications team without developer involvement.