Structured research publishing with approval and connected donor journeys

Challenge

Complex research content and disconnected journeys

The Florey Institute’s public website serves people exploring its neuroscience and mental health research, researchers and groups, students, and supporters. It publishes research priorities, conditions, people, projects, facilities and news. A separate support section presents information and routes for donors. The same public service has to make specialist research navigable and give supporters clear routes into fundraising information and donation.

Editors had little flexibility in how information was structured, while unsupported extensions increased the burden of maintaining the previous website. Email and fundraising tools sat outside the publishing flow, and routine content changes were difficult for internal teams to manage. The replacement also had to preserve relationships among complex research content during migration and introduce review before publication.

Solution

Structured publishing with an approval workflow

The WordPress implementation organised research profiles, groups, projects and institutional updates as structured content that administrators could maintain without specialist technical knowledge. An approval workflow gave teams a review step before changes went live while distributing routine editing across the organisation. Relationships among researchers, groups, projects and publications could then be presented consistently across those content types.

The current research hub lets visitors browse five priorities and a searchable list of conditions, then filter researchers or groups by role and research area. Group pages bring projects, team members and selected publications into one view, while the hub also carries dated research news. The support section presents several ways to give and provides a direct route to the online donation page.

The project also connected email and fundraising systems and revised responsive navigation, while internal teams took on routine and urgent updates with less IT support.

Following the combined redesign, publishing-workflow and integration project, donation-form views increased by 40.15%, unique visitors by 8.21% and page views by 9.7%.

Key stats