The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organization, and its website is the primary gateway to its working papers and research findings. When NBER committed to a thoroughgoing reconstruction of its online presence and web-based services, it engaged us as technical consultants to guide the effort from discovery through vendor selection.
We began by helping NBER understand its current backoffice technical landscape, mapping the systems and workflows that powered the site behind the scenes. That discovery work became the foundation for an RFP to modernize those systems and integrate them into a unified platform. The RFP was tailored to the distinct audiences the site serves: research economists, advanced students, and private-sector economists who use the site primarily to access full texts of working papers — a subset of whom also do business with NBER by responding to meeting invitations, organizing meetings, or submitting working papers; a comparatively literate public, mainstream journalists, and less advanced students seeking to understand economic research; and a broad general public who arrive via media links to NBER research. While the first group is NBER's core constituency, roughly one-third of the site's traffic comes from the second and third.
We also helped NBER evaluate the firms bidding on the work, ensuring the selected partner could deliver on the goals of the redesign: an updated look and feel, clearer navigation, an upgraded search function, better communication of NBER's mission and findings beyond the circle of research economists, and stronger support for the many programs, projects, conferences, and centers that operate under the NBER banner.
The engagement left NBER with a clear, defensible roadmap for a modernized platform — grounded in a genuine understanding of its systems and audiences — and a vetted partner equipped to carry it forward.