One archive, four audiences

The problem

The foundation had three websites. One for the science, built by a laboratory in 2014. One for schools, built by an agency in 2019. One for donations, running on a platform nobody in the building had a password for. The same report appeared on all three, in three different versions, and the newest one was rarely the one people found.

Four audiences want four different things from the same archive. A researcher wants the dataset and the method. A teacher wants something a class of thirteen year olds can read. A donor wants to know what the money did. A journalist wants a number and a person to quote, today.

What we did

We kept one archive and built four ways into it. Every document has one page, one address, one version. What changes is the route: a chronological research index, a set of teaching dossiers assembled from existing documents, a donation page that names the programme rather than the foundation, and a press room with the figures already extracted.

The system is thirty eight components with the rules written next to them, in the foundation’s own words rather than ours. Their communications officer has added two page types since handover without opening a support ticket, which was the actual brief.

The site is static, built from the archive, and costs eleven euros a month to host.

What it changed

Three sites became one. Requests to the team for documents that were already online fell by roughly two thirds in the first six months, measured on their own shared mailbox.

The teaching dossiers, which we expected to be the least used part, are the most visited section of the site.