Work

Institute for Women’s Policy Research

Transforming a static research archive into a dynamic engagement hub
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The Challenge

    •

    An Archive Disguised as a Platform

    The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has spent decades building a rich library of research that shapes federal legislation, informs state policy, and gives journalists the data they need on gender equity. But IWPR’s digital presence hadn’t kept pace. The existing site was static and served more like a digital archive, with only about 10% of homepage visitors clicking through to interior content. A significant share of IWPR’s pages weren’t showing up in search at all, meaning some of their most important work simply wasn’t findable, at a moment when their voice had never mattered more.

    The Approach

    •

    From Research Repository to Engagement Hub

    Teal conducted listening sessions with IWPR staff and leadership, an online survey with key audiences, a content audit, and an SEO review. We discovered that:

    • The site organized content around a confusing blend of priorities, pillars, and content types.
    • Research was largely locked inside PDFs, invisible to search engines and hard to share.
    • IWPR’s experts were buried and disconnected from their own publications.

    Teal worked with IWPR to center architecture and content decisions on their primary audiences – advocates, policymakers, journalists, and researchers with a shared goal of transforming iwpr.org into a platform that equips every visitor to discover, connect, and act. IWPR needed an engagement hub, not an archive.

    The Work

    •

    The Architecture

    Teal restructured the site around how audiences looked for content, rather than how IWPR thought about itself internally:

    • Issue area pages, previously thin taxonomy pages, became full storytelling hubs, surfacing featured research, policy context, related experts, and clear calls to action in one place.
    • A single, unified research landing page replaced the site’s fragmented entry points, with robust filtering by topic, publication type, date, and audience type. Audience-specific pathways were built into the homepage and primary navigation, giving policymakers, advocates, journalists, and researchers distinct entry points to the content most relevant to their work.
    • Experts are elevated as thought leaders, and gives their audience a way to connect with them.

    The Technical Foundation

    Teal built the new site on WordPress as a multisite installation, integrating iwpr.org and statepolicyactionlab.org into a shared platform, reducing maintenance overhead and creating durable infrastructure for IWPR’s expanding digital presence.

    Key features include:

    • Purposeful taxonomies that power content relationships across the site, enabling recommended reading pathways that connect related research and keep users engaged.
    • A comprehensive component library that enables authors to build visually rich, story-driven report pages without developer help. IWPR can now shift from static PDF publishing to a web-first model, where reports are browsable, searchable, and designed to meet audiences where they already are.
    • A cite this article tool that makes it easy for advocates, journalists, and researchers who rely on IWPR’s work to actually reference it.
    • Technical SEO that’s baked into the site architecture itself, making sure all content is well structured and indexable by search engines and LLMs.
    • Accessible from the ground up and fully optimized for mobile.

    Teal automatically migrated over 4,000 individual pieces of content, replacing bloated categories and tags with a more manageable and purpose-built set of taxonomies created specifically for relating old and new content to relevant IWPR priorities, topics, and initiatives.

    Migration

    4,229 Content pieces

    660 Taxonomy terms

    8 New content types

    Links
  • iwpr.org
    • Year of Completion

    2026

    Teal Media is a woman-led creative agency that builds brands and websites for nonprofits, foundations, and mission-driven organizations. We have a core presence in Washington, DC and Detroit, MI.

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