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Institutions, Nonprofits & Public Sector

Complex work, made understandable.

Data stories, learning platforms and public services that make complex work understandable.

A research institute publishes to scientists, industry and the public at once. A foundation speaks to donors, partners and the communities it serves. A municipality has residents, local companies, visitors and its own staff, all looking for something different on the same site.

Governance, procurement, accessibility obligations and a dozen departments with a stake in every page all shape the work. And the people keeping the site current are rarely a dedicated digital team.

Two volunteers sort donations into bins, with impact measures like food security and job attainment overlaid

What keeps coming up, and what we do about it

  1. 01

    A structure that mirrors the org chart.

    Content is filed by department, so visitors have to understand how the organization works before they can find anything.

    Organize around what people need

    We restructure content around audiences and the tasks they come to do, and can test that structure with real users before anything is built. Each audience gets a clear path through shared content.

  2. 02

    Data that’s published, then ignored.

    Reports, datasets and research sit in tables and PDFs. It’s all there, and almost nobody gets past page two.

    Make the research readable

    Clear summaries, well-designed visualizations, custom search and plain-language context turn data and research into something people explore. Specialists still get the detail, and everyone else gets the headline. Where it helps, search or chat can answer questions from your own research.

  3. 03

    Copies that drift apart.

    Editors duplicate content because they can’t find the original, and the versions quietly contradict each other.

    Model content once, for people and AI

    Programs, people, publications, events and locations become structured content, written once and reused wherever they’re needed, so there’s one version to keep current. Search summaries and AI assistants also represent structured content more accurately, which matters when your credibility depends on being quoted correctly.

  4. 04

    A platform nobody can maintain.

    Platforms with dozens of plugins become fragile, slow and dependent on a single outside developer.
    05

    Accessibility as an afterthought.

    The duty to serve everyone gets an audit at the end, which finds problems that are expensive to fix that late.

    Give the team a platform it can run

    A CMS and design system set up around how your team publishes, so editors across departments can work freely and the site still looks like one organization.

Where we’ve done it

The web platform for one of Canada’s three national centres of AI excellence, with custom search and a design system.
Read the case study: Amii
What We Do on amii.ca: Research, Literacy, Business Adoption and Startup AccelerationRichard S. Sutton, Martha White and J. Ross Mitchell under “We are home to some of the brightest minds in AI.”Reinforcement Learning tiles on amii.ca, each with a duotone halftone imageNews and insights cards on amii.ca, their images in halftone and duotone

Frequently asked questions

Questions institutions ask

  • Yes. We work with public bodies, institutions and foundations, and fit our process to your procurement, governance and sign-off steps.

Related

The expertise behind it