Case Study - Giving a Community Think Tank a Website That Shows Its Work
Since 2009, POLIS Institute has helped Central Florida communities think well so that funders invest well. Its old website buried that work in walls of copy and heavy pages. The rebuild gives every part of it a place to live.
- Client
- POLIS Institute
- Year
- Service
- Website Redesign, Information Architecture & SEO
The story at a glance
- 01 · The ProblemFifteen years of community work buried in walls of copy and heavy pages.
- 02 · What They WantedA site that shows funders and partners the work, and where they fit.
- 03 · What Was at StakeFunders who cannot find the evidence invest somewhere else.
- 04 · The PathwayInformation architecture first: the model, the divisions, services and stories.
- 05 · The Result77% lighter pages, every page described, LCP from 2.4s to about 1s.
01The Problem
Serious substance, buried below the fold
Nothing wrong with what they had to say.
POLIS Institute is a community-based think tank in Orlando. It started in 2009 with a single research question: what impact are nonprofits actually having on solving root problems? The answer a team of researchers led by Phil Hissom found was uncomfortable. Philanthropy was funding relief, not resolution. POLIS was founded to close that gap.
The organization calls itself a Think Well: the place a neighborhood goes to draw what it needs, sitting between residents and the people funding the work. That work now runs through four divisions: POLIS Fellowship, POLIS Collective, POLIS Media and POLIS Publishing.
It is a genuinely unusual organization, and that was the whole problem with the old website. The substance was all there. A visitor had to work extremely hard to find it, and a search engine could not find it at all.
- The model was never explained. Think Well appeared as a tagline and a passing italic reference, with no page explaining what it means or how it works.
- The ecosystem was invisible. The Fellowship was a heading partway down a long page. The other three divisions were not presented as divisions at all.
- Services and initiatives shared one page. A funder asking "what can I hire POLIS to do?" and a partner asking "what is POLIS doing now?" landed in the same scroll of bullet lists.
- Years of results sat on one long page, with the outcome numbers funders scan for baked into flat images.
02What They Wanted
A site that demonstrates the work instead of describing it
POLIS's own shorthand for the outcome it wants is Think Well. Invest Well. Live Well. The website needed to make that chain visible, so the people funding community work could see the evidence and act on it.
Explain the model
Let a funder understand the Think Well approach, and why it works, without a meeting.
A clear way in for each audience
Send partners, funders, residents and would-be Fellows each to the part of POLIS that is for them.
Proof funders can scan
Put fifteen years of outcomes where people, search engines and AI assistants can actually read them.
03What Was at Stake
When the evidence is hidden, the funding goes elsewhere
None of this was a content problem. It was a structure problem, and structure problems quietly decide who ever sees the work.
Funders look elsewhere
An organization whose credibility rests on evidence loses ground every time a funder cannot find the outcomes in a few clicks.
Invisible to search and AI
Fourteen of fifteen pages had no meta description, page titles were internal shorthand, and one page carried twelve H1 tags. Nothing told Google, or an AI assistant, what any page was about.
Residents shut out on mobile
The homepage transferred 12.5 MB and Our Work 15.9 MB. For residents on mobile data, that is an access problem, not a speed score.
Work that disappears
Several case study pages existed but were not linked from the navigation at all, so years of results were effectively unpublished.
04The Pathway
Give every part of the work a place to live
Architecture before aesthetics.
The rebuild was an information architecture project before it was a design project. POLIS does six or seven genuinely different things, and the old site had four places to put them. We started by giving each one a home.
- 01
Lead with a definition, not a slogan
The homepage hero now answers the only question a first-time visitor has: what is this organization, and what does it do? Then it sends the two audiences POLIS serves, partners and funders, to the right place.
Before
A tagline, a stock image and three buttons, with the actual explanation pushed below the fold. After
The new hero spends its most valuable space on a definition. HomepageThe old hero spent its most valuable real estate on a slogan. The new one spends it on a definition. - 02
Give the Think Well model its own page
The idea that defines POLIS now has a page that explains it, plus a homepage diagram that walks through the model in six steps: the Source, the System, the Solutions, the Strategy, the Access and the Impact. It names the three parties involved: the Satisfied is the community, the Think Well is POLIS, and the Pourer is the investor or philanthropist.
The model, on the homepageA funder can now understand the POLIS approach without leaving the homepage. 
/think-wellThe dedicated page breaks the same six stages into plain language and introduces FACES, the tool POLIS uses inside the approach. - 03
Make the four divisions the spine of the site
POLIS Fellowship, Collective, Media and Publishing are now presented as what they are: an interconnected ecosystem, each with its own identity, explanation and onward path.
The POLIS ecosystemFour divisions, four distinct ways to engage. This section did not exist in any form on the previous site. - 04
Separate services from initiatives
A new Services page answers "what can I hire POLIS to do," with six engagements that can be delivered alone or combined: community engagement and facilitation; research, GIS and community intelligence; strategy and partnership development; impact measurement and evaluation; communications and storytelling; and Fellowship research.
Our Work now answers the other question, "what is POLIS doing right now," and leads with the people and programs behind the work.
/servicesEach service has a card, an anchor and a detail section, so navigation can link straight to the one a visitor came for. Before
A gradient banner, a row of logos, then several thousand words of nested bullet lists. After
The new page opens on the people doing the work, then moves through programs, case studies, impact and partners. Our WorkThe old page transferred 15.9 MB on every load. The new one transfers 3.1 MB, an 80% reduction, while showing considerably more of the work. - 05
Give every impact story its own URL
Six community case studies now each have their own page, title and description, with the same structure every time: the Background, the Work, what Changed, the Solutions POLIS applied, and a way to bring the work to your own community.
The stories carry real weight. Communities of West Lakes documents a ten-year collective impact initiative that delivered a $100M campus. Eatonville covers resident-led work that contributed to a 10% poverty reduction and the town's Robert Wood Johnson Culture of Health Prize. Historic East Winter Garden sits alongside a 28% rise in per capita income. S.T.E.A.M. Wins with Representation reached more than 6,000 households, Strong Families reaches more than 1,200 caregivers a year, and the Black Nonprofit Leaders Network convened sixty leaders of color.
Before
One page holding every story, stacked one after another. After
Eatonville's outcomes as live text in a results band. Impact storiesThe numbers are no longer trapped inside images. They are selectable, readable by assistive technology, and indexable by search engines and AI answer engines.
HomepageCurrent initiatives and proven results both surface on the homepage, each card linking to a full page. - 06
Open one clear way in for each audience
The old navigation had six flat links and no call to action. The new one has eight sections with dropdowns exposing more than forty destinations, plus a Donate button that stays on screen. A new Connect page splits the three real ways to engage: explore the services, hire a POLIS Fellow to research a specific question, or partner on an initiative.
Before
On a phone, the old hero clipped its own headline and the buttons ran off the screen. After
The new mobile hero carries the full definition, one primary action and a persistent Donate button. MobileA phone is where a link from an email or social post gets opened, and it is where the old site gave up the most.
What we delivered
- Full Website Redesign
- Information Architecture
- Brand Expression & Visual System
- Messaging & Content Strategy
- Case Study Page System
- Technical SEO
- AEO & GEO for AI Search
- Performance Optimization
- Mobile Experience
- Conversion Paths & Forms
05The Result
The foundation for compounding visibility, in place
77%
Lighter homepage, 12.5 MB to 2.9 MB
18 of 18
Pages with a written title, description and single H1
2.4s to ~1s
Largest Contentful Paint on the homepage
The site is new, so the SEO and traffic compounding is still ahead of it. What can be measured today is the foundation, and it changed substantially.
Every page is now findable and describable. All eighteen pages carry a written title, a written meta description and exactly one H1. Titles moved from internal shorthand to the language people actually search, such as Community Engagement Services, Research and GIS and POLIS Fellowship | Thinkers Exploring Questions That Matter.
The pages got dramatically lighter. The homepage went from 12.5 MB to 2.9 MB and Our Work from 15.9 MB to 3.1 MB. Largest Contentful Paint on the homepage fell from roughly 2.4 seconds to around one second across repeated measurements.
The proof is machine readable. Outcome figures that lived inside images are now live text in structured results sections, which matters for Google and for the AI answer engines that increasingly field questions like "who does community development research in Central Florida."
Nothing is orphaned. Case study pages that were unreachable from the old navigation are now linked from Our Work, the homepage and the footer.
Sound familiar?
Does your organization's website show the work, or just describe it?
Mission-driven organizations almost always have more substance than their website admits. If yours is facing the same problem and you want a similar payoff, let's walk through what is buried in there.
No pressure and no pitch deck. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.