Interaction and Communication
MINDS is the Mandela Institute for Development Studies, a pan-African think tank and leadership platform. As the organisation approached its fifteenth year, Gala Digital redesigned and rebuilt its website so people could understand its programmes, explore its thinking and act on its opportunities through one clear digital experience.
Fifteen years of work had created a substantial body of programme information, research, leadership profiles and scholar stories. That depth was important, but it also made the website harder to organise around the different reasons people visit MINDS.
A prospective scholar needed a direct path from interest to eligibility. A partner or researcher needed to understand the organisation’s work and find the evidence behind it. The MINDS team also needed a practical way to keep adding people, programmes and insights without rebuilding the site each time.
Gala Digital began with workshops, a content audit and working sessions with the MINDS team. Together, we clarified the audiences, reorganised the information and developed a visual direction that placed the organisation’s people and work at the centre of the experience.
We scripted the website, designed its interface and built it in WordPress with Elementor Pro. The new structure gives every programme room to explain its purpose while connecting it to the wider MINDS story. Custom content and profile systems make the site easier to update, while focused interactions help visitors reach the information or action that matters to them.
December 2025 to May 2026
Interaction and Communication
Web Design, Information Architecture, Website Copywriting and Interface Design
WordPress and Elementor Pro
The work began by understanding how MINDS operates and how different audiences meet the organisation. Workshops, benchmarking and a content audit helped the team separate what needed greater visibility from what needed a clearer place in the wider story.
That thinking shaped the information architecture and the copy before the interface was built. It also gave the fifteen-year history, reported impact and programme archive a structure that could show the scale of the organisation without turning the homepage into a long institutional record.
Each MINDS programme now has enough space to explain why it exists, what it has achieved and how somebody can engage with it. A consistent page structure keeps the experience familiar while allowing the content and imagery to reflect the character of the programme itself.
This gives the homepage a clearer job. It introduces the organisation and helps visitors choose where to go next, rather than trying to carry every detail of every programme at once.
Scholarship visitors often arrive with one immediate question: am I eligible? Gala Digital designed a nine-step pre-qualification experience that answers that question before sending somebody into a longer application process.
The checker presents one requirement at a time and gives the visitor a clear outcome. Eligible applicants can continue to the application portal, while others understand which requirement does not yet match. The interaction makes the scholarship journey more useful without adding more text to the page.
The scholar experience was designed as a reusable content system. Visitors can move between sixteen cohorts, scan the people in each group and open a full profile without losing their place on the page.
Behind that experience, a dedicated content type and custom fields give the MINDS team a consistent way to add each person. Leadership and advisory-board biographies use focused pop-ups for the same reason: people can learn more without being sent through a collection of thin, disconnected pages.
The project did not stop at a new visual direction. Programme pages, people profiles, articles and resources were organised around repeatable structures the MINDS team can continue using in WordPress.
Search metadata, mobile responsiveness, performance and accessibility checks were included in the delivery process. Quality assurance, client feedback and handover then helped move the website from an approved concept into a working organisational platform.
MINDS now has one digital home for its programmes, fifteen-year history, scholarship journey, research and people. The live website gives visitors clearer routes into the organisation while giving the internal team a more dependable way to manage a growing body of content.
The finished experience includes a working scholarship eligibility checker, reusable programme and publishing structures, cohort filtering and custom people profiles. The result is a website that does not simply describe MINDS. It helps people find where they belong within its work.
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