Wilson Center
Organizing a world of insight for a global audience
When your organization is the authoritative voice on global policy, your website must work as hard as your research does.
Wilson Center, recognized as the #1 regional studies think tank in the world, is chartered by Congress and serves as a policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue. They create unbiased, nonpartisan content that helps audiences come to their own conclusions on policy issues. We began our partnership in 2016 to support their existing site, and we’ve since completed two full site redesigns as their digital needs have evolved.
With more than 100,000 pieces of content, 20-plus regional programs, and an audience spanning policymakers and the public, the challenge was never just building a better site. It was making everything Wilson Center had built over decades findable, connected, and unmistakably theirs.
Wilson Center needed a partner who could grow with them across nearly a decade of change, helping them communicate who they are as policy conversations continue to evolve. That is the kind of long-term relationship we are glad to be trusted with.
What we did
- Content migration
- Content strategy
- Digital strategy
- Drupal
- Paid media
- Performance tracking
- UX
- Visual design
- Website design
#1
W3 Silver Award
1k
pieces of content migrated to a new Drupal platform
1+
years of partnership
The focus
Wilson Center had the research, programs, experts, and decades of unparalleled policy insight, but their needs kept evolving alongside their audience. They needed a digital partner that could organize everything they had built, then adapt alongside them as their strategy and audiences shifted.
Our strategy
We started with the content, because that's where Wilson Center's authority lives. From there, we built a platform designed to surface it and grow with them.
Centering the content. At the core of our first redesign was a full content migration, mapping 245 fields and moving close to 100,000 pieces of content onto a new Drupal platform. That infrastructure proved durable. When the time came for the second redesign years later, the CMS infrastructure and functionality was still strong enough that we could focus our effort on the front-end rather than rebuilding from scratch.
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Connecting content across the site. The site features robust topic and region landing pages that aggregate featured content and add context to global policy issues. Dynamic logic promotes Wilson Center's content on nearly every page, so visitors are always presented with clear pathways to content of interest.
Unifying the brand across programs. Wilson Center has more than 20 programs covering every region of the world, but their digital presences felt disconnected to the parent brand. By creating branded microsites and surfacing program content alongside the Insights and Analysis hub, we connected each program to Wilson Center brand, letting it keep its own identity while staying part of the larger whole.
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The results
All together, our long-standing partnership with Wilson Center reaches well beyond a single website project: an original platform migration, a second redesign, marketing support, an expanded set of tools, and strategy for their intranet, microsites, and in-house digital displays. The site now holds more than 30,000 insights and analyses, and content from more than 20 regional programs, all on a single unified platform that continues to evolve alongside Wilson Center’s needs. The W3 Awards also took notice of our work, recognizing us with a silver award. Most importantly, our ongoing partnership has helped Wilson Center’s digital presence stay up to date as the policy environment shifts around them so that policymakers and the public can always access the independent research, they rely on to make sense of a complex world.
I’ve been through this process several times ... This is almost the website of my dreams right here.
Wilson Center stakeholder
Exponent
