Connecting impact, projects, and people

The Situation

For nearly 40 years, IMPACT has worked alongside communities, governments, and industry partners around the world to improve how natural resources are managed and who benefits from them.

Over time, the latest iteration of their website struggled to keep pace with the growth and complexity of the organization’s work. Content was spread across multiple and disparate formats, making the experience difficult to manage internally and harder for users to navigate externally.  

At the same time, IMPACT wanted to re-establish itself more visibly as a leader in the sector. Their work had helped shape major global conversations around conflict minerals, transparency, and responsible sourcing, but the website no longer reflected the depth or breadth of that impact.

The key challenges included:

• Disconnected content across projects, publications, and focus areas
• Navigation that made important information difficult to discover
• A growing web ecosystem that had become difficult to maintain
• A digital experience that focused more on process than human impact

The challenge wasn’t a lack of meaningful work.  It was creating a clearer, more connected way to experience it.

The Goal

The goal of the project was not simply to redesign the website. It was to create a more connected and strategic digital platform for the organization’s next chapter.

Success meant:

• Bringing IMPACT’s growing body of work together into one cohesive platform
• Making complex topics easier to navigate and understand
• Creating stronger connections between research, projects, regions, and focus areas
• Better showcasing the organization’s expertise, history, and global impact
• Building a flexible foundation for future campaigns, storytelling, and thought leadership

Just as importantly, the new website needed to showcase the positive and real-world outcomes of IMPACT’s work. The communities, partnerships, and people behind the issues.

The Approach

Organizing interconnected content

One of the biggest challenges of the project was structure.

IMPACT’s work is deeply interconnected. Research relates to projects. Projects relate to regions, supply chains, and focus areas. Insights and analysis often support multiple initiatives at once.

Rather than treating content as isolated pages, we worked closely with IMPACT’s team to develop a relational content structure that better reflected how their work connects in the real world.

Together, we mapped relationships between content types, developed systems for surfacing related material dynamically, and created a foundation that would make the site easier to grow and manage long-term.

The result is a platform that feels less like a traditional organizational website and more like a connected knowledge hub.

Designing for discovery and impact

The new information architecture was designed to help users explore complex topics more naturally.

Clearer pathways between focus areas, regions, projects, publications, and stories make it easier for visitors to discover related content without needing to understand IMPACT’s internal structure or terminology.

Interactive elements, improved filtering, and more flexible landing pages also helped surface more dynamic storytelling throughout the site. One particularly important addition was the interactive global map, which visually communicates the scale and reach of IMPACT’s work across multiple countries and regions.

At the same time, the visual direction shifted away from heavily technical imagery toward a more human-centered experience focused on communities, partnerships, and real-world outcomes.

Building a flexible platform for the future

Under the surface, the platform was designed to support long-term flexibility and growth.

The custom WordPress CMS allows IMPACT’s team to:

• Create new campaigns and landing pages
• Organize and connect content more effectively
• Publish multimedia resources and thought leadership
• Continue evolving the site without relying on developers for every update

The site was also designed with accessibility, multilingual support, mobile responsiveness, and future scalability in mind.

The Outcome

The new website gives IMPACT a digital presence that better reflects the scale, depth, and importance of their work.

While the site has only recently launched, the response from IMPACT’s team has already reinforced the value of the work, not only in the final result, but in the collaborative process that shaped it.

As one team member shared during launch discussions:

“You really led us through the process. We knew the general idea of what we wanted, but we needed someone who could help show us what it needed to become. The website looks amazing, and our entire team is thrilled.”

The outcome can be summarized by what the platform is now capable of:

• Makes complex information easier to explore and understand
• Creates stronger connections between research, projects, and outcomes
• Better showcases IMPACT’s expertise and leadership across the sector
• Provides a more scalable and manageable system for internal teams
• Creates a more engaging and human-centered experience for global audiences

“As anyone who has been involved with a website development project before knows, this was a massive lift. Thanks to the entire communications team at IMPACT and Baytek for their partnership in this project!”

Zuzia Danielski
Communications Director, IMPACT