The Brookings Institution is considered one of the top think tanks in the country. Brookings brings together more than 300 leading experts in government and academia from all over the world who provide the highest quality research, analysis, and policy recommendations on topics ranging from economics to international affairs, climate and energy, healthcare and more.
The Brookings website is where leading experts go to access Brookings’ research, commentary, scholars, and events. Teal was selected to build a new site that reflected the organization’s brand and position as a beacon for policymakers worldwide.
The Challenge
When Teal began our work in 2021, the most recent version of the Brookings website was already 5 years old. And although the site still served its purpose, technology had evolved, content had expanded, and new organizational priorities had been set. Brookings looked to Teal to transform the organization’s digital presence and build a new site that reflects its position as a world-wide leader. Our goals were to:
Devise a content strategy and governance plan to account for 100K+ unique pieces of existing content and support a publishing cadence of 75-125 additional pieces of content each week
Construct a flexible, scalable design system and infrastructure that would allow Brookings independent research programs to manage content and features per their specific priorities
Reduce the time and labor associated with content syndication, maintenance, troubleshooting, and bug fixes
Establish an engagement funnel to convert casual, occasional readers to regular readers and frequent attendees of Brookings events
Build a custom data and analytics dashboard to compile data across website analytics, SEO, social media, and more to make it easy for Brookings content managers to measure performance across different channels, to meet KPIs
Our Approach
Given the organization’s size and complexity—nearly 1,000 employees and dozens of projects and initiatives with unique priorities—Teal understood how important it was to collaborate and earn buy-in from people across all levels of the organization. To achieve this, we:
Kicked off the project with a robust discovery phase that included learning sessions with internal Brookings stakeholders, market research, data analysis, and in-depth interviews and surveys with target audiences
Set up a ‘concentric circle’ structure for review and feedback, with the Brookings’ web team at the center, followed by research program directors and stakeholders, and Brookings executive leadership
Established small working groups to dive deep into features including the sitewide taxonomy, site search, data visualization, data dashboard, Brookings’ story of impact, and digital marketing
Held monthly ‘town halls’ open to all Brookings staff, where we provided updates on our progress, discussed the reasoning behind certain decisions, and invited feedback
Conducted iterative testing of wireframes, visual designs, and front-end builds throughout the design and development process to ensure our work met stakeholder and target audience needs
Created a backlog of nice-to-have features and functionality for post-launch consideration, including custom HTML components and new functionality.
Held 2x/week office hours to answer questions and provide additional training throughout the content preparation and migration phases
Solution
Teal’s comprehensive solution for Brookings went far beyond the website—we transformed the way Brookings publishes and manages content, and builds relationships with target audiences. The incredibly friendly user interface makes navigating the site and finding information simple and effortless; yet there is an immense level of complexity that powers the interactions and data behind the site. That complexity is also invisible to Brookings content managers who are able to create and publish content efficiently and build dynamic content relationships across the site, regardless of what research program they are housed in. Highlights include:
A main navigation that reflects the topics that audiences typically seek out, rather than following Brookings departmental structure
A drastically simplified and shared sitewide taxonomy that breaks down walls between Brookings research programs, and will allow the site to surface content to visitors based on their browsing behavior with the help of a parse.ly integration
A tightly integrated marketing strategy that captures visitor information for mailing lists, subscriptions, and event RSVPs to promote continual and deepening engagement
A digital marketing campaign to announce the launch to Brookings’ audiences—everything from social media, email, paid advertising, and SEO to bolster brand awareness
Technical Details
A flexible, scalable design system that allows Brookings content creators to build their own pages from a library of shared components, blocks, and templates
A fully customized WordPress-based back-end interface with built-in ‘help’ documentation and reusable ‘snippets’
Programmatic migration and transformation of over 100,000 pieces of content in preparation for launch
Roles and permissions for multiple different levels of authorship, review, and publishing capabilities
Strict compliance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards
Best-of-class website hosting with powerful security features and web-application firewall
A robust sitewide search, powered by Algolia, with AI-based instant-search results
Robust and user-friendly data visualization tool based in Datawrapper
Multi-language translation capabilities on a per-article basis (English, Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish)
Seamless integration of Brookings email, event registration, and donate platforms
Heavily customized analytics engine, including a customized data layer to track specific page metrics, as well as ensure continuity of analytics between ‘old’ and ‘new’ sites.
Launching Brookings
The new Brookings website launched in June 2023. Teal continues to support Brookings with ongoing audience research, regular iteration and improvements, new features and functionality releases, and digital marketing support.
Teal has turned out to be the perfect partner for us. Sometimes in life you get lucky enough to find the perfect partner. Teal has been the epitome of the problem-solving partner. There is a Japanese concept of Shokunin, or the spiritual obligation to society to be the best you can be at your craft to make the world a better place. Teal embodies this!
