Clowns Without Borders brings laughter and play to children in crisis zones, refugee camps, and communities facing hardship around the world. Their performances offer healing through joy during some of humanity’s darkest moments.
For an organization doing such vital and joy-bringing work, their decade-old website and brand were not meeting the challenge.
Clowns Without Borders faced a unique branding challenge: they needed to communicate the serious impact of their work while staying true to their joyful, playful nature.
Many potential supporters struggled to understand why play matters when children face life-threatening circumstances. The organization found themselves constantly explaining why laughter isn’t frivolous — it’s essential medicine for trauma and resilience.
Behind the scenes, their website had become unmanageable. Years of content additions created a tangled backend with too many moving parts and too many interdependencies. Information quickly became outdated, and the navigation overwhelmed visitors trying to understand their work. Staff spent valuable time managing an overly complex system instead of focusing on their mission.
Key challenges included:
The core questions we tackled for this project included:
How do you balance joyful work with the realities of human suffering in a way that feels empathetic, stays true to the mission, and motivates people to take action?
From a technical perspective, how do you manage a large content migration while curating existing materials to maintain SEO value and brand equity without overwhelming visitors?
Our work began with the Nonprofit Beacon to understand Clowns Without Borders’ unique position in the humanitarian space, as well as their strategic direction and communications/fundraising goals.
Through strategy and alignment workshops with their team, we explored how to authentically represent their dual nature — serious about impact, joyful in approach. We identified the core tension between perceived “necessity” and the real psychological needs their work addresses.
UX research revealed how visitors currently navigated their complex site and where they got lost or confused. We then developed two distinct design directions that helped the team align on the big picture vision for their new digital home. This collaborative process ensured the final direction would resonate with both staff and supporters while staying true to their mission.
Over the course of 4 months, we worked within their budgetary constraints to deliver a complete transformation.
The new website embraces joy without minimizing the serious contexts where Clowns Without Borders works. Playful copy and delightful interactions — including an interactive map and animated clown in the footer — capture the spirit of their performances. Fun iconography throughout the site reinforces that play isn’t frivolous; it’s powerful.
The technical overhaul streamlined their content management significantly. We helped curate their extensive blog archives, focusing on their strongest stories while improving SEO performance. The simplified navigation and reduced content volume means visitors can quickly understand their work and staff can easily maintain accurate information.
The organization now has internal alignment around their messaging and feels reinvigorated about sharing their unique approach to humanitarian work.
“We wanted a website that was fun but also that communicated the seriousness of what we do. Pixel Lighthouse totally understood that need.“
— Naomi Shafer, Executive Director of Clowns Without Borders
Over 4 months, Clowns Without Borders went from a cluttered, hard-to-navigate website to a joyful digital space that makes their unique humanitarian approach impossible to ignore.
Ready to see how the right website strategy can help your nonprofit better communicate your unique mission? Book a call with us to explore what’s possible.
Schedule a free 20-minute strategy session with Austin and Andrea. We’ll talk about where you’ve been, where you’d like to go, and how your website can help you get there.