RCYBC Website — Roodenburg Design Consultants

BC Representative for Children and Youth (RC&Y)

Website and Brand Refresh

Designing a website and brand identity to better serve British Columbia’s youth in care.

RC&Y had a clear purpose and a decade-old website that no longer reflected it. Roodenburg Design Consultants worked alongside development partner IdeaHack to rebuild the digital presence from the ground up, starting not with design, but with strategy. The result is a website that speaks directly to youth in care while serving the full range of people working to support them across British Columbia.

RC&Y website in action.

The Challenge

RC&Y has spent decades doing some of the most important advocacy work in British Columbia. They stand alongside children and youth in care, hold systems accountable, and push for meaningful change.

But their public presence wasn't keeping pace. A website unchanged since 2015, no unified visual identity, and communications that varied across channels meant the outside world wasn't seeing the organization that those inside it knew. RC&Y was ready to change that.

Their audiences made the work more layered. Youth in care, foster parents, social workers, Indigenous leaders, government partners, and media: all needed something different from the same organization. RC&Y understood this. They came to the table with clarity about their values and a real sense of who they are. What they needed was a brand and a digital presence that could carry that forward progressively.

The Approach

We applied our Clearing Framework to work through what was essential and what wasn't.

We started by listening. Stakeholder workshops, audience research, and a full audit of the existing website revealed what was working, what was missing, and what needed to go. Analytics confirmed that Get Help and Reports were the most visited sections of the site, a finding that shaped every structural decision that followed.

From there, we developed a brand identity grounded in RC&Y's own values. A Brand Essence exercise with leadership distilled the organization's character into five words: Caring, Leader, Balanced, Protector, and Professional. These became the foundation for a visual identity and Brand Identity Playbook that gave RC&Y a consistent system to build from. Photography direction was developed to ensure the visual language felt real and relatable, not institutional.

With Roodenburg leading design and strategy, and navigation in partnership with IdeaHack, the website was restructured around user needs. Accessibility was treated as a baseline. The design balanced colour and restraint, speaking to government partners and youth alike. Photography was art directed so that young people arriving at the site would see themselves reflected immediately.

The Outcome

“The result is a renewed brand that works together with the website as a more unified communications platform.”

The newly launched RC&Y website reflects an organization that knows who it is and who it is trying to reach. The visual identity is consistent, approachable, and distinct from typical government or nonprofit aesthetics. The site is fully mobile-responsive, accessible, and structured around the needs of its audiences rather than the internal logic of the organization.

Youth visiting the site now encounter a design that speaks to them directly, with clear pathways to help and a visual tone that feels warm and credible rather than institutional. The Get Help section is prominent and easy to reach from anywhere on the site. Reports and publications are organized for usability, with clear hierarchy so that visitors can move from summaries to full documents at their own pace.

The brand foundations developed through this process extend beyond the website. The Brand Essence framework, audience research, and visual identity system give RC&Y a consistent platform for communications across all channels going forward.

The project also leaves RC&Y with a clear strategic picture of who their audiences are and what those audiences need from them. That clarity has value well beyond the website itself. It informs how the organization communicates with government partners, how it shows up in media, and how it continues to build trust with the youth, families, and communities it serves.

Visit the Representative for Children and Youth website.