The Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) is a London-based research organisation, consultancy and think-tank. It aims to advance the prospects of Jewish communities in the United Kingdom and across Europe by conducting research and informing policy development in dialogue with those best placed to influence Jewish life positively. JPR's audience comprises researchers and students, community and policy leaders, decision-makers and government professionals, the general Jewish community in the UK, Europe and beyond, and all those interested in Jewish communities, identity and demography.

However, despite its goal to impact policy, the institute has been working with an outdated website for quite some time: it was not mobile-compatible, was limited in design options, could not present videos and was difficult to browse and maintain. JPR also missed other key media channels: it had no Facebook or Instagram pages and did not run campaigns on social media; it had no strategy behind its mailings, sent from outdated software; and since it never hired a comms professional before, it had no comms strategy.

Being the first person to hold the Director of Communications position, I have decided to use the website development process to dive into JPR's goals and audiences. Through a lengthy discovery process that included weekly workshops, we characterised the institute's audience as 'users', created personas and imagined user journeys. We then wrote blogs and new pages with SEO on our minds, and produced videos to embed as insights. We made some difficult choices to create a brand-new website that not only presents the reports we produce in a friendly and modern way – but allows us to add different kinds of content, from videos and blogs to our recent #1 rated podcast and (coming up) parallax pages. The website launch was accompanied by a branded digital marketing campaign using JPR's newly created social media pages.

Our efforts did not go in vain, resulting in a wapping 300% growth in monthly website visitors and 500% growth in Google search clicks over the first year of the new website's activity.