What needed doing
Global Witness do extraordinary investigative work, and they had plenty of content to show for it. But the website had grown organically over the years, shaped more by internal structures than by the people using it. With a brand refresh and a new website on the horizon, they wanted to get the foundations right first: a clear, evidence-based picture of what was working, what wasn’t, and what their content could become.
The audit: uncovering the issues
You can’t fix what you can’t see, so we started by looking, measuring and analysing. We ran a content audit and health check across 4,221 pages, scoring a cross-section against a set of quality measures and weighing it against Global Witness’s strategy and audiences.
The real value of an audit isn’t in listing faults; it’s in replacing hunches and internal debate with shared evidence. Ours pointed to six themes to address: a voice that had drifted, too little human presence, too many overlapping content types, too much content overall, no consistent approach to other languages, and content that needed sharper editing. Naming them gave everyone a common language for the work ahead – and a clear mandate for change.
A clearer content model and architecture
The audit’s clearest message was that the content needed systematising. Years of organic growth had left at least 20 overlapping content types and an architecture that followed the organisation’s own structure rather than the way people actually look for things.
So we designed a new content model and information architecture from the audience inwards. We reduced the tangle of content types to a focused, modular set – which, counter-intuitively, made room for richer storytelling: with fewer types to maintain, content can be built from reusable components like data visualisations, timelines, audio and image galleries. We designed a system to bring policy positions out of buried PDFs and into the open, and replaced a catch-all blog with genuine news and opinion. We made the case for putting investigations front and centre, reflecting Global Witness’s real strength as investigative campaigners, and introduced a “paddle, swim, dive” approach so readers can skim the surface or dive right into the detail.
We pressure-tested every decision in a workshop against a set of plain-language principles. (A favourite: how many times do the words “we”, “us” and “our” appear? The best structures speak to the audience, not the org chart.)
Governance, language and a plan
A content model is only as good as the discipline that keeps it alive; left alone, any site drifts back towards sprawl. So we gave Global Witness the tools to stay on top of theirs. Two decision trees – one for archiving, one for maintenance – turn “should this stay?” from a judgement call into a simple, consistent test: content that earns at least a visit a day stays, and nothing is published above a certain reading age.
Global Witness are a global organisation, but their site was 95% English, with ten other languages added organically over time. We set out four options for a more deliberate multi-language approach – weighing reach, cost and effort – and recommended the one that best fits how they work.
Finally, we turned all of this into a practical tool they could act on: a content plan and working space built in Coda, linking every piece back to the audit findings and with a live dashboard to track progress, plus a starter content style guide for the team to check content against as they go.
Outcomes
The audit told a story: around 10% of Global Witness’s pages were doing 90% of the work, while more than 3,000 English-language pages scored as difficult or very difficult to read.
So we didn’t just hand over a report. We cut the content types down from 20 to a documented, modular model, built an information architecture around how people actually use the site, and gave Global Witness a multi-language framework, an archiving policy and a content plan in Coda with a live dashboard. They came away with the foundations for a new website and sustainable tools for content that stays useful for years, not months.
The lesson worth learning
When 10% of your pages carry 90% of your traffic, the brave move isn’t publishing more. It’s deciding what to stop.
