Where Change Happens
The Centre for Social Innovation is an inspiring co-working concept based in Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 2003, the Centre exists both as a physical place – two floors in a beautifully renovated green building, where dozens of tenants share services and resources – and as an entity to incubate innovation and facilitate creativity and collaboration in the social mission sector. It is a unique and very successful model for how to truly foster social change.
Communicopia has been a tenant at the Centre since its launch, and was pleased to be asked to lead web strategy and development for CSI in 2007. A new site had become a necessity, as the Centre had tripled in size in 2006, and their old site no longer reflected their current space, activities, and position in the community.
With the Social Entrepreneurship Summit looming as a deadline, Communicopia and CSI worked together on a tight timeline to turn around the new site. With clean, fresh design, compelling images, simple information architecture, and intelligent copywriting, the new site “matches” the space, and effectively conveys the activities and spirit of the Centre. It also features member profiles for the dozens of inspiring groups and individuals who work out of the space, affording them all greater profile on the web as well.
“We’re so happy with the way the new site turned out!” reports Tonya Surman, founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Social Innovation. “It was so important to us to have a site that reflects us properly, but it’s a huge job to distill an ever-evolving and many-faceted enterprise like ours down into a two-dimensional website. Together with Communicopia, we nailed it, and we couldn’t be happier.”