An institution’s website is its most public-facing document. For international organisations, NGOs and government agencies, the website is often the first — and sometimes the only — point of contact with the people they serve. Yet the gap between best practice and reality is striking. Many of the world’s most important institutions operate websites that would have looked dated in 2015: cluttered navigation, inaccessible documents, broken search, no mobile optimisation, and content strategies that treat the web as a repository for PDF files rather than a communication channel.
This matters more than it might seem. Trust in institutions correlates with their perceived competence, and perceived competence begins with first impressions. A government portal that takes eight seconds to load on a mobile phone in Nairobi or Jakarta sends a message about that government’s priorities, whether intentional or not. An NGO whose annual report is only available as a 47-page PDF is not meaningfully transparent — it is technically compliant in a way that excludes most of its potential audience.
Our digital coverage examines institutional communication through this lens. We look at how design choices shape public perception of credibility, how organisations can use the web to build genuine transparency rather than performative openness, and what the best-run institutions — from the Nordic government portals to the World Bank’s data platform — are doing differently.
