Through its grants, the Ontario Trillium Foundation (OTF) is making the province a healthier, more vibrant place to live. To ensure non-profits and grassroots organizations better understand the funding programs that are available to them, OTF asked the Ascribe team to refresh its PowerPoint presentations to be more engaging and easy to read.

How Ascribe helped

OTF provides grants to non-profits so they can deliver projects and services that build healthy, vibrant communities throughout Ontario. One of its granting programs is the Youth Opportunities Fund (YOF), which supports projects that improve the well-being of children, youth and families facing systemic barriers. Having worked with Ascribe on its annual report from 2018 to 2021, OTF called on us again in 2022 to update its YOF PowerPoint presentations. The goal: to help potential applicants better understand the opportunities available through the YOF as well as the eligibility requirements and application process.

Specifically, our team was tasked with writing the content for four PowerPoint decks: one providing an introduction to the YOF overall, two focused on the Youth Innovations and Family Innovations funding streams, and another explaining the role of an organizational mentor in helping grassroots groups administer the funding they receive.

The older versions of these presentations were very dense and copy-heavy, so they needed to be updated to be easier to read and digest at a glance. We started by developing content outlines, explaining how we would restructure and break apart the existing slides to not only improve the story flow but also to make the PowerPoints more flexible and modular so they could be used in a variety of situations. We also identified success stories from the annual reports that could be inserted into the decks to represent the YOF grants in action and help communities and non-profits see themselves reflected in the content.

With the client’s approval of the outlines we then wrote the content, working directly in the new OTF PowerPoint templates developed by our graphic design partner, Accurate Creative. Across all four presentations, we ensured good information design and on-slide arrangement of the content for clarity and impact. The final presentations, each 20 to 30 slides in length, were well received by OTF.

Deliverables: Research stories

Our process:

• Background material review
• Content outlines
• Writing and revisions