LESLIE GARVEY

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Some Context

In the spring of 2019 — amidst many troubling efforts by the Trump administration to chill government whistleblowers — the Project On Government Oversight launched a campaign to educate and inform federal employees about their whistleblower rights and protections.

The campaign included:

1. The launch of a new survival guide for federal employees, both print and online
2. A campaign video
   
3. A new landing page on the POGO website consolidating and showcasing all of its whistleblower resources in one place
   
4. An 8-part email course, distilling the key points of the survival guide
5. Digital and out-of-home advertisements promoting the landing page

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My Role

I served as the main project lead and point-of-contact to coordinate timelines and deliverables relating to the campaign launch — both internally across teams and externally to the video, graphic design, and web vendors involved in the project.

Additionally as part of this campaign, I:

• managed a $60,000 budget
• designed graphics for the survival guide, landing page, and e-course
• guided the visuals of campaign materials with vendors
• contributed substantially to scriptwriting for the campaign video
• collaborated with the survival guide authors on messaging and copy
• co-authored the 8-part email course

Originally titled “The Art of Anonymous Activism,” I proposed a title that the authors would eventually choose as the final for the survival guide: “Caught Between Conscience and Career.”

I also designed the cover and chapter illustrations for the survival guide.
The authors had included epigraphs to set the tone of each chapter, and I incorporated those into these illustrations.

In conceptualizing these designs, I was aiming for something that felt unified with the mood, tone, and subject matter of the chapter these illustrations were facing.I also drew from actual primary government sources (for example, unclassified documents and reports) for many of these assets.

I intended for these to be much more bold and colorful than the traditional or expected look of government materials. I’d had a number of conversations with former federal workers who felt that many materials targeted at them left them feeling like drones: they were tired of text-heavy publications with minimal graphics and personality.

I also created a number of micro-illustrations to accompany the web and print layout:

This video, one of the first pieces to get moving on this campaign, was definitely a challenge in messaging.

I found a video agency to work closely with on the scriptwriting, editing, and storyboard process, because it was a goal of the project to strike a careful, nuanced position on whistleblowing throughout this campaign.

The risks of whistleblowing, particularly publicly, are high. It is not an act to be taken lightly. The goal of this campaign was to acknowledge those risks and educate around how to navigate them — but without discouraging federal employees from coming forward.

With the aim of empowering federal employees, I settled on “be prepared, know your rights” as the overall takeaway from the video.

Inspired by similar e-courses I’d subscribed to from InVision and Pew Research Center, I introduced the idea that we could distill the survival guide’s main points into bite-sized articles in a multi-part automated e-course.

I co-authored and edited the drafts of each of these chapters and directed the visual direction and layout of the email series.

This e-couse would later be featured on Really Good Emails and in Campaign Monitor’s “Best Email Drip Campaign Examples of 2019.” 

In collaboration with our website vendor, I guided the visual direction of the landing page that would consolidate all of POGO’s federal employee resources in one place. 

This included determining the content hierarchy of these items, writing copy and microcopy, and designing illustrations for this page.

As part of the campaign, we placed advertisements I designed in WMATA buses and transit locations around the metro DC area, concentrated in locations near major federal agencies or otherwise well-trafficked by government employees on their commutes.