WDFPU — Platform for a Non-Profit Ahead of COP29
"Woman, Development, Future" Public Union is a non-profit organisation running education programmes, events and international cooperation projects.
The platform was built as part of their work around COP29 — the UN climate conference hosted in Baku in November 2024.
The problem
Most website deadlines are soft. Everyone says a date, the date moves, nobody minds much.
This one had a conference attached to it. COP29 was going to happen on specific days in November whether the site existed or not. An organisation presenting itself to an international audience around that event needed the site live before it, not during it and certainly not after — because the entire value of the site was concentrated in a two-week window when people would be looking.
That changes how a project is run. Every decision gets weighed against the calendar. Scope that would be nice becomes scope that is negotiable, and the difference has to be identified early rather than discovered in week eight.
What we built
A clear, well-structured site presenting the organisation, its programmes, its events, and its work — for an audience that had mostly never heard of it before that month.
Built for an international audience. Visitors arriving from a global event, from many countries, on unfamiliar connections. The site had to be immediately legible to someone with no context and no patience.
Fast, and light. Not a technical preference — a requirement for an audience arriving on mobile from anywhere.
Delivered on the date. September to November, live before the conference.
Why the scope conversation happened first
The temptation on a deadline project is to agree to everything and work harder.
That does not produce a site on time. It produces a site that is 85% finished on the day it needed to be live, which is the same as not having one.
So the first conversation was about what the site had to do in November, versus what could be added afterwards. That is not an exciting conversation and it is the reason the project shipped. Most delays on website projects are decided at the start, long before anyone is behind schedule — by scope that was never examined and content nobody was assigned to write.
Result
A working platform, live before COP29, presenting a non-profit organisation to an international audience during the one window when that audience was paying attention.
Built by DAKER — design, development, deployment.
