08/20/2026
When the Institute on the Environment — University of Minnesota selected iFactory to partner with their team on a website overhaul, we were excited. The goal was to help them communicate their mission of building a future where people and the planet prosper together and we were really excited to dive in together. Everything we planned and executed was directly tied to their goals of promoting and growing their partnership model, building a whole new civic engagement experience, and broadening their institutional reach across state, region and globe.
Every project has its challenges. In this case, there were many stakeholders with different POVs, a large corpus of archival content, and a large volume of content written in an academically sophisticated voice that was not optimized for public consumption or discoverability via Search Engines and standard AI tools. From our 30+ years of experience, we know that mission-driven research organizations often bring an unparalleled level of passion and depth of knowledge that is core to their brand story, but is not always framed compellingly online. We knew this was absolutely essential to IonE at its core.
While we are neither scientists nor researchers, we are humans living on earth, and this is our own future at hand. As the IonE team says, "when people with different expertise, experience and perspective work together, they produce something none of them could have achieved alone." We passionately wanted to help them spread their message effectively, increase their reach, and effectively connect with the right audiences in ways that suit them.
Our respective teams partnered to create a user experience that makes research, ongoing initiatives and stories of partnership easy to find and explore, impactful stories of people and projects that were highly consumable and sharable, and clear success metrics that align directly with their mission, strategic plan and project goals.
Go see for yourself what amazing work they're doing: https://bit.ly/3SKakk5
