The Lenfest Institute is a nonprofit organization “whose sole mission is to develop and support sustainable business models for great local journalism.” In 2018, Austin Smith, the CEO of Alley, was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Institute. While there, Austin wrote a report entitled the Narrow Path for Local News. When the Lenfest Institute decided to overhaul their web presence, they knew where to turn for strong strategy, design, and development.
The goal of the project was to implement a redesign and new backend for the site, improving Lenfest’s position among its peer institutions and better featuring the breadth of their impact with grantees, funders, and collaborators. To do this, we migrated them from their existing WordPress instance to a cleaner custom theme that makes it easier for content creators and visitors to use. The design was made responsive and created clearer navigation and hierarchy of content.
The Lenfest Institute is excited for the new Gutenberg blocks implementation and the simplified workflow for featuring content on the homepage and other prominent pages. “Now we have a central platform for growing our audience and reaching more people – the platform makes it easier to produce original programming and research – we’re better able to promote our work,” said Yossi Lichterman, Manager, Editorial and Digital Strategy at Lenfest. Having a unified hub has already reaped rewards for Lenfest, with better reach and engagement reflected clearly in the analytics, even just a month after going live.
Alley has always been a strong supporter of journalists and especially local news. We are proud to work on projects that give people the tools they need to succeed in this challenging and ever-changing environment. Check out some of our other projects to learn more about how we support journalists and publishers.