Healthcare · Research
IAVI
A research nonprofit's science, structured for four audiences, fast enough for low-bandwidth regions.
- Role
- Senior engineer (with Yes&)
- Duration
- Project-based
- Stack
- WordPressPHPMySQL
4 distinct paths
Audiences served
Low-bandwidth first
Performance target
On estimate
Delivered
Background
IAVI is a nonprofit scientific research organization developing vaccines and antibodies for HIV, tuberculosis, and emerging infectious diseases, with a mission centered on making those innovations accessible in the low-income countries that need them most. Its work spans laboratories, clinical research centers across Africa and India, and partnerships with governments, funders, and pharmaceutical companies.
An organization like IAVI lives on communication: donors fund what they understand, policymakers support what they can explain, and research partners engage with what they can find.
Challenge
IAVI's website had to communicate complex science to four very different audiences (donors, researchers, policymakers, and the public) without dumbing it down for some or burying it for others. Most research-organization sites fail in one of those two directions: press-release shallow, or journal-article impenetrable.
There was an infrastructure constraint too, and it was a mission constraint: much of IAVI's audience is in low-bandwidth regions. A site about global health equity that only performs on fiber connections would contradict its own mission. And the communications team needed to publish ongoing research news without engineering support.
Approach
Nikkio was senior engineer on the WordPress build with Yes&. The architectural answer to the multi-audience problem was separating audience-driven entry points (donate, partner, learn) from research-driven content streams. Each audience gets a coherent path through the same body of science, rather than one flattened hierarchy that serves nobody.
Performance and accessibility were engineering priorities with mission stakes: aggressive attention to page weight and load behavior for low-bandwidth regions, and clean semantics for assistive technologies. Editorial workflow stayed deliberately simple: a research communications team should spend its effort on the science, not the CMS.
Results
The site supports IAVI's storytelling about its research portfolio and impact across all four audiences, and the communications team publishes without engineering bottlenecks.
The structure has held as the portfolio evolved, from HIV vaccine research through antibody programs and emerging-disease work, because the content architecture was built around how research organizations actually communicate: programs, results, and partnerships, each findable by the audience that needs it.
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