Center for Civic Innovation
Completed: Fall 2024
Client: Center for Civic Innovation
Sector: Civics & Community Engagement
Scope of Work: Web Design & Strategy
Copy & Photography: CCI Team (shout out to Nadia, Clara, Kyle & Rohit)
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but CCI’s new website is up there. Their original site was designed quickly in 2018, and was added on to by dozens of people over the years. The mission was unclear, information was hard to find, and people were lost.
CCI does a lot, and their website needed to solve three major needs:
Learn & Engage: How does Atlanta’s specific government work? How is the budget decided? How do we center people at the center of policy?
Stay up to Date: Where else can we get a real-time sense of what’s happening, with context for how everything fits in?
Engagement Opportunities: Learn about the CCI Fellowship Program and other ways to get involved
This can make it tricky to organize. If all three goals are the top priority, which goes first? How do we structure them?
We opted to design a site that was part wiki, part media org, part learning hub.
CCI works tirelessly to cover public policy and publish updates about granular city goings-on: the real stuff that affects us.
Outside of that in a more evergreen sense, they’ve written detailed but easy to parse explainers on city government, city budget, neighborhood planning, and other categories.
All elected officials, public figures, CCI staff, and CCI fellows have their own profile pages that both list articles where they’ve been mentioned and can be linked to within other articles.
This means that: maybe you’re reading an article about a divisive policy that someone is proposing… and see that XYZ person is at the forefront of it. You can click on their name, learn more about their background and their potential conflicts of interest, and then see where they’ve popped up in other coverage. You can build a holistic understanding of someone’s background and priorities.
Events are catalogued, updated, and streamed live with transcriptions and recaps afterwards. There’s also a potential option to create a hub for community events.
One of my favorite quotes I jotted down during a meeting: “You should be overwhelmed with all the ways to get involved in Atlanta.”
The idea is that now, you can get lost on the site in a good way.
I’m excited to see how it grows and adapts to meet the greater comunity’s needs, especially as we move into election seasons and new things are proposed for the city.
