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ClimateRISE Year in Review
A newsletter that makes a year of distributed coalition work feel as joined-up as it is.
The ClimateRISE Alliance, anchored by Dasra, works across India on community-led climate resilience. We designed its flagship Year in Review newsletter, concept, content architecture, editorial flow and design, built from Dasra’s raw material and launched at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026.
What we delivered
A single long-scroll newsletter holding six working groups, three fireside voices, six publications and partner reflections as one read.
Voice, depth, breadth, spotlight, evidence, reflection, invitation, a spine that holds dense material without flattening it.
A working-notebook look that reads place-based and community-led, without corporate gloss or generic-NGO softness.
Two jobs that usually fight
Year-in-reviews for coalitions almost always become lists: a scrollable directory of programmes and acronyms, useful as a reference, unread as a piece. The newsletter had two jobs that fight. Report, with specificity, what the Alliance carried forward, partner by partner. And recruit, make the work feel ongoing and joinable to a first-time reader. One artifact, two audiences, one read.
Set the order of telling first
Before any visual decision, Dasra’s raw material was mapped onto a seven-act spine: leadership voice, fireside depth, working-group breadth, gender spotlight, publication evidence, partner reflection, invitation to join. Long-scroll over multi-page, because a coalition’s year is one connected thing, and the read is paced so an existing partner finds their group quickly while a new reader is carried to the invitation at the end.
One artifact, two audiences, one read. The order of telling does the work before the design does.
A notebook, not a brochure
The register borrows from a working notebook: paper texture, ruled lines, lavender hand-script for section breaks, two small bird mascots in the margins. A notebook is what the work looks like before it gets written up, and the newsletter is honest about that. The palette stays warm and specific, cream paper, marigold, dark teal, lavender, stepping away from the pale-teal-and-leaf every Indian climate publication defaults to.
An artifact that keeps working
The honest measure isn’t opens or click-throughs. It is whether the artifact gets read, whether partners put their own credibility behind it by sharing it, whether new collaborators arrive already understanding the work. The Year in Review went out as the Alliance’s public face at Dasra Philanthropy Week 2026 as a single shareable link, not a downloaded PDF, so it travels in a DM, an email, a phone opened in a meeting.
