For think tanks and research institutes
Your research is only as credible as the page it is published on.
A journalist opens your site on deadline to find the finding and the person who can talk about it. A policy adviser opens it before a meeting to check who you are and who pays for the work. A funder opens it before renewing a grant. An AI model reads it when someone asks who has researched your question.
Each of them decides from what they find, not from what you meant to publish.
What most research sites give them
- Reports published as PDFs, with a landing page that holds a title, a date and a download button.
- Authors named on the cover of the report and nowhere on the site, so their body of work cannot be found in one place.
- No page that says who funds the work, how independence is protected, or what the methodology is.
- A search that finds blog posts but not the research.
- A press page with a phone number nobody answers and no embargo or spokesperson process.
- A publishing workflow that runs through one person, who is also running events.
None of these is a design problem. Each one makes the work harder to find, harder to cite and harder to trust, and the reader rarely tells you which one lost them.
What I build
- A publications system where every report, briefing and working paper has its own page: summary, key findings, authors, date, topic and a stable URL that a journalist or a model can cite.
- The full text in the page, not only in the PDF, so it can be read on a phone, by a screen reader and by a search engine.
- Author pages that collect each researcher’s work, maintained by the researchers themselves.
- Funding and independence pages in the place a journalist or a funder looks: who funds you, what you will not accept, how you handle conflicts.
- A newsroom with spokespeople, embargo terms and press contacts that stays current after launch.
- A content system your team publishes to without a developer, with review before anything goes live.
How it works
The same two steps as every engagement. A Blueprint Audit reads the site the way each of those readers does and scores ten areas. Then a fixed proposal, or a recommendation against one. Details on the process page.
For a think tank or research institute the audit adds a publications review: what is findable, what is citable, what sits only inside a PDF, and what an AI model currently says about your work when asked.
You can read how this went for one research organisation in the FAR.AI case study.
Questions
No. The audit decides which publications earn a full page and which keep a landing page with a proper summary. Most libraries have a small set that people actually cite, and that set comes first.
No. What you disclose is your board’s decision. The website’s job is to put what you have decided in the place readers look for it, and to keep it current.
No. Your researchers do, in a system built so they can. I build the structure, the templates and the review rules, and I work with FAR.AI, a research organisation, on exactly this.
Two clicks. Three things.
Send the address of your website. Within two working days you get a short email naming the three things a funder would hold against it, including what AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews currently say about you. No report, no call, no follow-up unless you ask.
Received. Your three things arrive within two working days.
That did not send. Email hello@socialectric.com with your website address and I will reply from there.
If your publications are the first thing a journalist, a policy adviser or a funder reads about you, a Blueprint Audit reads them the way each of those readers does and tells you in writing what they will find.