Work
Since 1951, the Animal Welfare Institute has advanced animal welfare through science-based policy and legal advocacy, deliberately favoring achievable change over headlines. That scholarly depth is AWI’s differentiator. It was also the website’s biggest liability.
Decades of content lived in a hard-coded site organized around internal program ownership, not visitor intent. Nothing was tagged, so nothing could relate itself. The clearest symptom: the search page ranked among the site’s top ten pages every month. Visitors weren’t browsing AWI’s content. They were excavating it. And a small in-house team had to maintain all of it.
Discovery surfaced a unifying insight: whether they’re an advocate, a researcher, or an educator, AWI’s visitors arrive looking for one specific thing. The architecture had to make that effortless, then surface the related content program staff work hard to produce but few visitors ever saw.
Teal pressure-tested that premise through three sprints of wireframe user testing with representative users from every primary audience, tracing how each actually traveled through the site before any visual design began. Testing confirmed the core structural bet: a global taxonomy of programs and campaigns that lets content organize itself. A Campaign page automatically pulls in its related actions, bills, articles, and resources, replacing years of hand-built links.
AWI is proudly a bit old-school, a scholarly organization that solicits donations once a year and refuses popups. The design honors that: a clean, credible reading experience built for genuinely long pages, with on-page navigation and ADA-conscious patterns. Calls to action live inside the content, matched to what the visitor is reading. A relevant action appears on a whaling campaign page, not a generic donation banner. Engagement earned through relevance, which is exactly how AWI approaches its advocacy.
AWI’s team develops in-house, so Teal designed for handoff from day one: eight custom page templates, a twelve-component build-your-own UI library, and a full style guide. Teal consulted through development to ensure everything was buildable as specified, but AWI’s developers did the building. They now own the system completely, able to construct any future page without agency involvement.
Seventy years of rigorous, science-based content is no longer something visitors have to search for — it finds them. And the team that maintains it needed no agency to build it.
A brand and website built to influence this country’s most progressive donors.
The part where we ask you to cough up your email. So we can discuss all the amazing things we’re gonna do together. No pressure. Really.