The CCPA team spans one national and five regional offices, each with its own working styles, communication needs, and content priorities. Aligning these into a unified web vision required careful listening and navigation.
How we helped Canada's leading progressive voice redesign its site.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) is one of Canada’s leading progressive think tanks, but over time its website became increasingly difficult to navigate. After years of decentralized content development across its national and five regional offices, CCPA recognized the need for a streamlined, user-friendly website aligned with its evolving identity and impact. To support a full redesign, CCPA brought Spur on to conduct internal research and engagement to surface priorities for the new site. The goal was to ensure the website reflected CCPA’s values and credibility while also enhancing usability, supporting brand alignment, and strengthening supporter engagement.
There were several challenges to the project, but by consistently anchoring conversations in a shared commitment to equity, impact, and clarity, we created space for alignment and trust.
The CCPA team spans one national and five regional offices, each with its own working styles, communication needs, and content priorities. Aligning these into a unified web vision required careful listening and navigation.
The project ran alongside CCPA’s regular publishing and advocacy work, in a fast-moving political environment. Interviewees had to balance participation with pressing operational demands and editorial deadlines. Spur also had to carry out its work at the very outset of a larger project that included a website design and development partner, Forge and Smith, conscious that the pace of our phase of the project would influence many additional stages of work still to come.
CCPA’s existing analytics and audience engagement data varied widely across offices. Some teams had rich insight to share; others had limited access or data pools to contribute to our research and analysis.
We structured the work in two key phases:
Spur began with a comprehensive review of all engagement data provided by CCPA. We identified key trends and exceptional data points related to how different users interact with the site—where they got stuck, what content they sought out, and how they navigated through it.
We conducted 22 interviews with staff from the national and all five regional offices. Participants spanned a range of roles and business functions—from communications to fundraising to research. To ensure candour and comfort, interviews were one-on-one and anonymized. We followed the lead of each participant, probing deeper where we sensed uncertainty, energy, or untapped insight.
The CCPA team is intellectually diverse: some staff wanted clear, factual summaries; others hoped to visualize how feedback would influence the future site. To meet both needs, we developed two final outputs: A detailed analysis of all interview data and a visual summary report that included key insights, design implications, and recommendations for the new site structure. This ensured that staff across offices—and Forge & Smith, CCPA’s web development partner—could understand and act on the findings.
We were proud to hit the following key performance indicators:
Spur’s internal engagement process equipped CCPA and Forge & Smith with a clear, trusted foundation for redesigning the national website. CCPA shared that our reports clearly reflected a deep understanding of their organization and that we had listened closely to what staff needed from the new website. Moreover, our outputs helped Forge & Smith launch their discovery process with well-synthesized internal insight and shared priorities already in place. Overall, our work directly shaped foundational design decisions reflected in the new site, from content organization and navigation to how each regional office was represented distinctly.
