Living Our Values Online: EngenderHealth’s New Website

By Traci L. Baird

I am so excited to launch EngenderHealth’s new website. Developing this site has allowed us to make sure all of our content is updated, to organize the site to be consistent with what we do and how we do it, and to ensure our site is fully responsive for viewing on any device.

Our site highlights the remarkable achievements of our programs and partners, resources we are proud to share, and stories about the impact of our work. We have a robust plan for keeping our site updated and having it evolve with our strategy and impact so readers can be assured the information they find here is current.

As pleased as I am with the content and design, I am especially proud of how our site reflects our values and our principles for language use.

Our organizational values of reflection, integrity, inclusion, and respect were top of mind as we designed our website. We are committed to using our blog, technical publications and other resources, program summaries, and more, to share our reflections on what we do, how we do it, and lessons we are learning along the way. Our value of integrity comes through in our insistence on double-checking data, being thoughtful about attribution, and establishing systems for correcting errors.

Our commitment to inclusion guided our decisions about content—ensuring it represents the depth and breadth of our work and partnerships—and format. Our web developers selected design elements and functionalities to maximize accessibility and readability for all audiences and across all platforms.

We recognize that having an English-only website right now (with some documents in French) creates a massive gap in accessibility; our best recourse was to ensure our writing is clear and to make multi-language materials as available as possible. We are also researching translation options to expand our site’s accessibility to broader audiences.

We demonstrate our value of respect through our framing and language. We are intentional about highlighting the vital roles of our partners and demonstrating how EngenderHealth contributes to collective accomplishments. Additionally, we applied our Principles of Language Use and subject-specific language guides while developing content to ensure the words we use are as accurate, respectful, and inclusive as possible.

I feel an obligation not only to share information but to do so in a way that is just and true to our principles. I see an enormous opportunity in stating this priority: by telling people what we aim to accomplish we can hold ourselves accountable and invite sincere input. This site is new and much improved, but we recognize that it is neither perfect nor a “final” version. We are eager to continue refining our content and approach as we learn from feedback and the examples of others.

It is my hope that our new site will help visitors gain a better understanding of the importance of the issues EngenderHealth and its partners are working to address, and the positive impact being made in communities around the world. Maybe it will even inspire some of you to join us.