The climate crisis is one of the most pressing issues of today, and it’s clear the politics of climate has changed dramatically in recent years. When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, it represented the largest investment in clean energy in history—and offered clear evidence that the Biden-Harris Administration was prioritizing climate action. But a huge problem remained: Americans, and young people in particular, didn’t know much about it.
Climate Power is working to meet that challenge. The organization runs strategic communications campaigns to highlight the benefits of climate action and keep climate issues front-of-mind for the public. Climate Power reached out to Blue State to build a microsite that touted the many climate and clean energy benefits of the clean energy plan in an easy-to-digest and engaging format to launch the day of President Biden’s State of the Union Address on February 7, 2023.
Blue State got to work, establishing key themes to bring the initiative under a collective identity: approachable, trustworthy, energized. In close collaboration with the Climate Power team, our strategists and developers built out concepts to highlight the material. We started with style tiles, conceptualizing initial drafts of multiple web modules for features including pull quotes, email capture, highlighted statistics, and policy reports.
Breaking down dense data with interactivity
We prioritized interactive elements, to make reading dense material more reader-friendly, clickable, conducive to sharing, and fun. That included stylized hyperlinks to other sources, embedded footnotes to provide additional context, and breaking up text with clear and concise graphs and tables, often with an animated or interactive element.
We also built a custom, interactive map to encourage discovery and offer partners targeted statistics, highlighting economic impacts by state and broken down by industry. Blue State developers built out the backend using Airtable, ensuring the Climate Power team could easily update data on the backend with new quarterly clean energy job reports and other updated economic figures, updating the map on the front-end without custom coding.
In addition to the data visualizations included on the page, we also built out a number of dynamic, animated, parallax collages that help bring a new level of excitement to the page. The flexibility of the page and its components allow the Climate Power team to easily update data and content over time.
We built these elements – and the entire website – with a focus on flexibility, allowing Climate Power to easily edit the website over time, changing the order of features, adding new sections (such as a custom testimonial feature added after the initial launch), and even creating special sub-pages to highlight specific programs or aspects of the IRA.
A State of the Union Launch
The website launched in time for the State of the Union, with a score of partner organizations, elected officials, and even Hollywood celebrities sharing it to highlight specific impacts of the law. Since launch, the website has attracted more than 1 million (and counting) engagements on the site. Climate Power also ran TV ads explaining how the IRA created jobs and decreased costs, directing viewers to the website.
With this work, we used our expertise in web development and design to help progressives illustrate the clear impacts of a landmark climate law. By focusing on flexible, interactive web modules and a custom-built interactive map, we’re helping thousands of Americans discover how President Biden’s administration is lowering costs and creating jobs with his clean energy plan.
