Michigan Hunger Study
Transforming the first statewide assessment of charitable food assistance since 2014 into an interactive digital experience
Work
~2.4K technical SEO issues resolved
23.6% increase in Indexed Pages
92% Score on SEO from Core Web Vitals
Evergreen Action has become one of the most influential climate policy organizations in the country in just five years. Founded by former staffers from Governor Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign, Evergreen helped shape, pass, and implement the Inflation Reduction Act — the largest climate investment in U.S. history. Their policy products land on legislators’ desks. Their talking points show up in press coverage. Their state-by-state playbooks are shaping how governors approach the clean energy transition.
The website for Evergreen failed to effectively serve its core audience—activists, press, and policymakers—because complicated site architecture hid critical policy resources and data. This resulted in a high homepage exit rate and low average time on key pages. Beyond the structural issues, a legal compliance problem needed to be solved: Evergreen operates as two separate entities (Evergreen Action C4 and Evergreen Collaborative C3), and the existing website blurred the distinction between their political advocacy and policy research. A redesign was imperative to create distinct digital presences for the two entities that could share infrastructure while maintaining legal separation.
Teal’s discovery process surfaced a critical insight about how Evergreen’s audiences actually use policy content. These aren’t casual readers. Grasstops activists, Hill staffers, and journalists come to the site to collect ammunition — data points, talking points, policy summaries — that they’ll then carry into meetings, calls, and stories. The site needed to function less like a publication and more like a research arsenal with a built-in export system.
That insight reframed the entire architecture. Instead of organizing the site around content types alone, Teal organized it around what visitors are trying to do:
A persistent sidebar lets users grab content snippets — statistics, policy recommendations, key quotes, data visualizations — from anywhere on the site and save them to a personal collection for both C4 and C3 content. When they’re done browsing, they can take their organized collection off the website through printing, email, or social sharing.
For a Hill staffer preparing a memo for their legislator, or an activist prepping for a meeting with a state energy commissioner, this transforms the site from a reference library into a tool.
Teal transformed the C3/C4 split from a typical backend constraint into a core design principle. The two sites run on a single WordPress multisite installation, sharing components, templates, and a unified taxonomy. But they maintain distinct URLs, distinct navigation, and a strict content boundary: C4 can surface C3 content, but never the reverse.
This shared infrastructure means Evergreen’s team doesn’t maintain two separate design systems or two separate CMSs. A policy resource created on the C3 side is automatically discoverable on the C4 site’s Policy Resource Hub through cross-site queries. A taxonomy of priorities, states, campaigns, and content types threads through both sites, so tagging a resource once makes it filterable everywhere it needs to be. The architecture solves a legal problem and a workflow problem simultaneously.
Evergreen entered 2026 facing the most hostile federal policy environment for climate action in a generation. Teal delivered a product that gave a thirty-person organization the digital infrastructure of one ten times its size. As the organization moves into the year with a deeper need for data to inform rapid decision making, Teal overhauled Evergreen’s analytics.
We replaced Evergreen’s complex, analyst-dependent Power BI dashboards with a custom, user-friendly 5-page Looker Studio dashboard. It provides comms teams with immediate insights into state page engagement, resource downloads, sharing activity, and content consumption without needing an analyst to update reports. Post-launch, Evergreen has a mission-aligned, low-maintenance measurement system that surfaces advocacy impact.
Teal has been just a phenomenal partner through this... the best thing we've done this whole process is hiring you all"
Evergreen entered 2026 facing the most hostile federal policy environment for climate action in a generation. Teal delivered a product that gave a thirty-person organization the digital infrastructure of one ten times its size. Two legally distinct, architecturally unified websites — with a content collection tool that turns passive browsing into active advocacy, a self-serve analytics system, and an infrastructure built for an organization that can’t afford to be a news cycle behind.
Teal Media completely changed what we were able to build—what our websites could be.
I’ve worked on plenty of sites that look good, function fine, have good copy, check all the boxes. But this was different. It felt like we were building something truly meant for our audiences—decision makers, advocates, reporters, funders—not just something that represents our brand.
Transforming the first statewide assessment of charitable food assistance since 2014 into an interactive digital experience
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