Institute for Policy Studies
Partnering with Institute for Policy Studies
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is a leading progressive organization dedicated to providing social movements and impacted communities with top-quality research and resources to help them achieve their goals.
In 2024, we partnered with IPS on a website redesign aimed at aligning their digital presence with their mission and making their content more streamlined and accessible.
We brought this vision to life with a modern, elegant, and accessible website—designed not only as a comfortable tool for action but also to empower their team with long-term ease of management.
Why a Redesign?
IPS’s old website faced significant technical limitations: the mobile experience was subpar, the search function returned outdated and irrelevant results, and related content was difficult to discover organically.
Branding-wise, the old design failed to reflect IPS’s engagement with social movements, positioning the website primarily as a resource repository rather than showcasing its active role as an impactful collaborator in policy change.
From a digital strategy perspective, while newsletters and social media consistently drove traffic to the website, poor navigation and content structure hindered deeper engagement and discouraged exploration of related content.
Most importantly, many issues IPS had long championed –such as inequality, the climate crisis, and militarism– had reached a boiling point, making it crucial for them to provide a better resource to those working to tackle these challenges.
Aligning Strategy and Design
The Institute for Policy Studies needed a dynamic platform that would not only serve as a rich resource library and but also amplify its identity as a nonprofit actively committed to its movement partners. The redesigned website features clearer calls to action, integrates better with IPS allies and project sites, expands networking opportunities, and offers a more engaging experience than the previous research-focused site.
Streamlining Navigation for Impact
Given the breadth and volume of content that the Institute for Policy Studies produces, it was important that the new website would not intimidate or overwhelm the audience. We refined the sitemap, menu, and navigation to ensure an intuitive and encouraging user journey for visitors with varying interests and levels of knowledge about the organization. The new website structure seamlessly guides users, whether they are seeking information, exploring resources, or looking for opportunities to take action.
Organizing Content for Clarity
With expertise spanning multiple issue areas, IPS faced challenges in helping users find relevant, up-to-date information tailored to their specific needs—and content managers struggled with an unwieldy backend. Together, we reorganized and migrated their content, refining the website’s taxonomy with improved tags and categories. The result? A streamlined, user-friendly site that’s easy to navigate, search, and leverage for dynamic content delivery.
Creating a Resource Hub for the Institute for Policy Studies
As a think tank, IPS produces an extensive collection of content on the policies they champion—including reports, articles, and other educational resources.
In line with its mission to support grassroots groups by providing valuable research for key campaigns, IPS required an accessible and easily searchable database.
To meet this need, we designed a new resource library that allows users to filter and sort resources by content type, issues, author, and projects. With enhanced front and backend functionality, the library improves user experience while ensuring IPS can add resources for years to come, without compromising usability.
Empowering Content Managers with Flexibility
We’re big fans of Gutenberg for its flexibility in creating and customizing pages and posts with blocks and patterns. That’s why we built the IPS website using WordPress’s native editor, giving content managers full control without sacrificing security. With Gutenberg, there’s no need to worry about updating additional content-related plugins, and the search and drag-and-drop backend makes management a breeze. The result is a structured yet intuitive system that stays on brand while offering the flexibility needed for future growth.
Supporting a Vision
IPS’s new website accurately reflects the scope and depth of their work, interconnects their various resources and issue areas in an organic way, and is engaging, inviting, and exciting to use as a resource.
We share IPS’s vision of a future where all people, regardless of background or kinship, are empowered to live thriving lives in harmony with the planet and all other forms of life. We are excited to see how IPS’s vibrant new website will provide grassroots organizations with the resources they need to help bring this vision closer to reality!
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