The Women of Color in Engineering Collaborative brings together many of the field's largest professional societies behind a shared goal: creating the supportive, inclusive environment that women of color in engineering have too often been denied. It's an ambitious mandate backed by serious institutional weight.
What it didn't have was the team to turn that mandate into something people could see and use. The collaborative needed a brand and a website, custom tools to actually deliver on its mission, and a steady stream of communications to keep its community engaged, but no in-house design, engineering, or content function to build any of it. Building that capacity from scratch wasn't realistic for an organization meant to coordinate members, not staff up like an agency.
Noteworthy Lab built WCEC's digital presence end to end, and then kept it running. We created the logo, brand, and style guide, designed and built the website, and established the visual system the collaborative still works from today.
On that foundation we built the two custom tools at the center of WCEC's work. The Inspiring Leaders Profiles Database is a searchable directory celebrating women of color in engineering across the U.S. and its territories, with a detailed application and profile system, public profiles, and a collaborator registration flow that lets organizations find and connect with the leaders featured. The Resource Center is an interactive, searchable hub where administrators add resources and members filter and search across research, toolkits, webinars, and reports relevant to women of color in engineering. Both were built as real software, using a modern no-code and custom stack, rather than stitched together from off-the-shelf plugins.
And we kept the collaborative visible. For a full year we designed and sent the monthly newsletter, created the social media graphics and copy, and drafted the communications around WCEC's webinar programming, so the community always had a reason to stay engaged and a consistent voice to recognize.
WCEC now has a cohesive brand, a website that holds its growing programs, and two working products that turn its mission into something tangible: a directory that makes women of color in engineering visible to the organizations looking for them, and a resource center with close to a hundred curated resources its community can actually use.
Because the tools were built to be maintained by WCEC's own team, the collaborative isn't dependent on us to keep them running. We built the capacity, not just the deliverables, which is what lets a member-coordinating organization operate like it has a full digital team behind it.
