Case Study
Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition
Making statewide bicycle advocacy feel local — and building a site that still holds up years later.
[ Photo: cyclists on a Rhode Island road or path — open road, sense of statewide scale ]
The organization
Since 2004, the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition has worked to make cycling safe and accessible across the entire state — advocacy, education, community events, and legislative work spanning every city and town in Rhode Island. Statewide advocacy is a genuinely difficult communication problem: the work is local, the audience is distributed, and “Rhode Island” means something different to a Providence cyclist than to someone in Westerly.
When RI Bike came in for a rebuild, they were on the same worn-out volunteer site that so many advocacy orgs end up with — busy, blog-heavy, no clear structure, no sense of the geography they were actually serving — the same pattern I see across small orgs of every kind, not just advocacy groups.
The key decision was geographic. A statewide org that just lists its work isn’t useful to a cyclist in Cranston trying to find out what’s happening in their town. The site needed to work at the state level and the neighborhood level simultaneously.
What we built
01
Find Your Town
A geographic structure organizing RI Bike’s work by region — North, Central, South, Southeast & Islands. State-level advocacy becomes locally legible. A cyclist anywhere in Rhode Island can find what’s relevant to them.
02
Why I Bike
A dynamic testimonial feature: a real person’s photo and reason for riding, rotating on every page load. RI Bike’s idea; the block brings a human voice to org-level advocacy without the site feeling like a brochure.
03
Built to last
Clean architecture, clear navigation, no dependencies on heavy page builders. The site has stayed functional and well-structured through years of minimal maintenance — a standard worth designing for from the start.
[ Screenshot: ribike.org — Find Your Town section or homepage ]
Does this sound like your organization?
Your org serves a whole region. Does your site?
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