Casa das Palmeiras: Making a nonprofit easier to find and support

The story was strong. The website was not helping it.

Casa das Palmeiras was founded in 1956 by Dr. Nise da Silveira, a Brazilian psychiatrist known for defending humane mental health treatment and using art as part of psychiatric care.

That history matters, but on the old website it was hard to reach. The organization's online presence lived on a Blogspot page with a default theme, long posts, scattered links, and very little hierarchy. There was meaningful content there, but visitors had to work too hard to understand what Casa das Palmeiras did, why it mattered, and how they could help.

For an organization that depends on donations, volunteers, and public understanding, that was not just an aesthetic problem. It was a findability problem.

People wanted to help, but the site made them hunt.

I tested the existing site with 10 people who did not already know Casa das Palmeiras. The tasks were simple: understand what the organization does, find out how to donate, and find out how to get involved as a volunteer.

Those tasks should not have been difficult, but they were. Participants could usually find fragments of the answer, but rarely the full path. The mission was buried in old posts, donation information appeared as a bank account number inside dense text, volunteering was mentioned without a clear path, and Dr. Nise's story was spread across disconnected links that felt more academic than welcoming.

The issue was not that the information did not exist. It was that the site treated every piece of content as if it had the same priority, so visitors had to assemble the story themselves.

Structure first. Then visibility.

The redesign started with information architecture, not decoration. I reorganized the homepage around the things a new visitor would need first: what Casa das Palmeiras is, who Dr. Nise was, how art connects to the institution's work, how to donate, and how to volunteer.

I proposed a clear navigation bar, dropdown menus, visible calls to action, and a homepage that used client artwork as a central visual element. The artwork was already one of the strongest parts of the organization's identity, so hiding it deep in the site made no sense.

I did not approach this as a full rebrand. Casa das Palmeiras did not need to become a shiny new thing; it needed a clearer way for people to understand and support what was already there.

The important actions needed to stop hiding.

Two of the most important visitor actions were also two of the hardest to complete: donating and volunteering.

For donations, the old site relied mostly on a bank deposit number embedded in text. I proposed making donation paths visible from the homepage and expanding the options so support did not depend on someone copying banking information from a paragraph.

For volunteering, the problem was similar. The information existed in pieces, but the site did not treat it as a primary path. The redesign made volunteering part of the main structure, so someone who arrived wanting to help would not need to read the entire archive to figure out where to start.

This was not about pushing users into conversion funnels in the startup sense. It was about respecting the intent they already had when they arrived.

The same story could not be posted the same way everywhere.

The communication strategy extended beyond the website because Casa das Palmeiras had different audiences in different places. A researcher, a potential donor, a volunteer, and someone discovering Dr. Nise through culture would not all enter through the same door.

For LinkedIn, I designed an editorial carousel focused on the institution's history and Dr. Nise's importance, speaking more directly to professionals, researchers, and potential institutional supporters.

For Twitter/X, I used a cultural hook that already existed: the film Nise: O Coração da Loucura. It gave people a familiar entry point into a story that could otherwise feel distant or academic.

For Instagram, the tone became more visual and intimate, using archival photographs and client artwork in a way that felt closer to a person sharing the institution's story than an organization making an announcement.

The content was already there. The path was not.

The redesign did not invent a new story for Casa das Palmeiras. It made the existing one easier to enter.

The old site had history, donation information, artwork, institutional context, and volunteer mentions, but those pieces were scattered across posts and pages without a clear hierarchy. The proposal reorganized them around the questions real visitors had: What is this place? Why does it matter? How can I help? Where do I go next?

That kind of work can look simple when it is done, but it matters. For small organizations, unclear structure turns into lost support, lost attention, and unnecessary friction for people who were already willing to care.

Not every project needs a louder identity.

Casa das Palmeiras did not need to become louder, trendier, or more polished for the sake of it. The organization already had a powerful history and a visual language rooted in the artwork of its clients.

The design problem was more basic and more important: make the mission understandable, make the support paths visible, and make the archive feel like a door instead of a maze.

That is the part I still care about in this project. Sometimes the most useful design work is not adding more. It is putting what already exists in the right order.