Harvard Belfer Center

Making expertise as visible as it is consequential

When your institution is shaping global policy, your digital presence needs to do more than keep up. It needs to lead.

The Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center brings together 150 scholars to advance policy-relevant research and train the next generation of leaders and scholars. We collaborated with Belfer's team to create a leading digital experience as visionary and impactful as its experts.

We partnered with them to build a site that positioned Belfer as a leader in policy conversations.

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What we did

Audience research
Content governance
Content migration
Content strategy
Digital strategy
Drupal
Information architecture
Performance tracking
SEO
Taxonomy

1%

increase in search impressions QoQ post-launch

1k

pieces of content

migrated & optimized

#1

W3 Gold Award for Schools & Universities

The focus

Belfer had the scholars, the research, and a record of insights that bridge the gap between scholarly rigor and real-world impact. What they needed was a digital experience that brought all of it together as one coherent institution with a clear point of view.

Harvard Belfer Center website components

Our strategy

We started with the tension at the center of Belfer's identity: a Harvard institution that also needed to stand on its own. From there, we worked to make that identity visible and navigable, building a content architecture that could organize a massive volume of research, experts, and publications without losing the brand supporting it.

Balancing identity. Being both a Harvard institution and a global force required balancing academic aesthetics with contemporary appeal. We drew on Harvard's iconic crimson and a classically modern serif typeface, Canela, pairing it with immersive photography and a minimal layout to elevate Belfer's of-the-moment content and reinforce its relationship with the oldest, most recognized university in the United States.

Unifying the brand. Belfer's strength as a think tank posed its greatest challenge as a digital brand. Siloed navigation, independent expert brands, and inconsistent design put individual people and programs ahead of institutional priorities and emerging issues. Through restructured information architecture, intuitive taxonomy, streamlined navigation, and an editor-friendly, component-based design and CMS, we created a seamless experience that helps position Belfer as more than a collection of topics and experts; it's where policy makers turn to inform world-changing decisions.

Digital-first publishing. Belfer's content is consequential. It informs real policy decisions with real global implications. Yet without metrics for performance and engagement, stagnant content eroded its reputation for relevance. We worked with Belfer's editorial team to create a new platform, technical SEO strategies, content governance plan, and strategy framework to have more eyes on their amazing work. A custom-built Google analytics dashboard and advanced traffic-tracking tools empower authors and editors to publish and promote more of what matters, when it matters.

The results

Since launch, the Belfer Center has seen more than 10% growth in organic search clicks and more than 41% growth in search impressions, quarter over quarter. The site has also tripled its top 1–3 positions in Google search results, a direct reflection of how much more visible Belfer's expertise has become. The W3 Awards took notice, recognizing our work with a gold award. Most importantly, our work helped surface Belfer's depth of expertise so that the scholars and ideas shaping global policy are as easy to find as they are to trust.

What we did

1%

1k

#1

The focus

Our strategy

The results

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