Friends and colleagues,
This August, Civilytics turns 10.
When Jared started Civilytics in August 2016, he made the logo on a free business card website. The site we deployed when Hannah joined was a bog-standard WordPress theme. We kept patching it and swatting away hundreds of spam comments for half a decade. Updating the logo and site to speak to the work we are doing now had been on our to-do list literally for years, but it always seemed like too heavy a lift amidst client work.
We’re so happy that today it’s finally time for a change! Today we’re launching a new website, a new visual identity, and a new tagline that reflects what we’ve actually been doing all along: social science for the public good.
Our old tagline was “Measuring the pulse of civic life.” We still believe in the importance of that mission. Our newsletter The Civic Pulse references that goal. But we find our value to clients has been less in the measurement of civic life and more in engaging directly with it. We apply our social science toolbox to questions of public policy, together with partners invested in the answer.
What hasn’t changed
The team, the methods, and the standards. We still:
- Apply rigorous methods and high-quality standards to our work
- Work shoulder-to-shoulder with clients on sustainable solutions
- Lead with kindness, compassion, and our values
Ten years in, the work we’re proudest of is quite varied. A few highlights from our past:
- The Strategic Data Project at Harvard. Jared’s first major engagement and one that defined Civilytics’ earliest work focused on building sustainable, reproducible data analytics together with partners. Jared trained education data analysts across the country to write R, run causal designs, build predictive models, and visualize their findings. He worked with great colleagues and co-authors whose work he has continued to follow for years!
- The $5 billion ARPA discovery. Five words in a Senate amendment shifted $5 billion in pandemic relief between states. We caught the change, which was almost certainly made for ease of disbursement, not policy principles. The Intercept used our analysis to put Treasury, the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Schumer on the record. We also put out the earliest projections of ARPA aid allocations, earning national coverage.
- Partnerships with grassroots organizations. Our work with Reimagine Los Angeles, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, and the formerly incarcerated people and family members they organize alongside has shaped how we think about whose questions deserve rigorous answers and who usually has to fight to get access to data and transparency.
What’s new
The brand. New logo, new color palette, new typography. A cleaner, more modern look so that our visual identity finally matches the quality of our work.
The site. New from the ground up. We went with a Hugo static site, used modular CSS, and deployed to a global CDN (Cloudflare in front). The whole thing is in version control, with a CI pipeline that validates content frontmatter and checks every link on every change. The content is focused on who we are, what we’ve done, and why you should choose us.
The new site is a huge upgrade. Mobile load times dropped from an average of seven seconds to under two. The contact page, embarrassingly, took 18 seconds to load on mobile under our old WordPress install. Now, it’s 1.6s. Some pages dropped from over 3 MB to under 300 KB. Performance scores jumped from a mobile average of 70 to a mobile average of 98.
And did we mention it looks nicer too?
That brings us to how we were able to do this now.
We used AI.
When looking over our options to redesign, we took this as an opportunity to see what we could accomplish with Claude Code, an AI coding agent from Anthropic. Rebranding while serving clients had been on our list for years, but the lift was too high. AI tools made it tractable for a two-person team to design, build, and deploy a production website without stopping client work.
AI tools allowed us to do things beyond our own skillset, including increasing the accessibility of our website.
We are cautious AI adopters. AI has real negative externalities and poses real dangers in many walks of life. However, we think the only credible posture is to engage with these tools directly: use them, understand their limitations, and bring that experience back to clients. A consulting firm that won’t touch AI in 2026 is a less useful advisor than one that has tested its limits and used it for meaningful work.
This website is a portfolio piece to our work with AI tools. We expect to write more about what we learned in the future but, for now, the short version is that the productivity gains are real and the work to validate, correct, and decide is still significant. The site outperforms the one it replaced not only because AI is clever but because we used AI to do things it is highly proficient in.
Client highlight: Delivering an AI-powered knowledge base
We also have a new AI-driven project with the Student Leadership Network (SLN) that we’ve loved working on the past couple months. For SLN, we’re building a curated literature review of research evidence on college access interventions and practices. The modern wrinkle is the desire to have the literature review not be a static document but a deployed knowledge base that the team can interact with, extend, and build upon using AI tools.
We’ve been working with Claude Code and testing how research evidence, human expertise, and machine capabilities interact. The project is still in progress, but it’s been fascinating to work on building an interactive knowledge base that allows users to ask questions, generate their own views of the evidence base, and look up specific details accurately and quickly.
What’s next
Hannah is booking client engagements for Q3 and Q4 2026. If you’re scoping a project (a one-off analysis, a longer-term embedded engagement, a training, or extra capacity while a team member is on leave), get in touch (opens in new tab).
Subscribe to The Civic Pulse if you don’t already. While it’s the same publication, it’s now lightly refreshed to match the new look.
Poke around. Tell us what you find. We migrated a lot of content and migrations are hard to get right! If a link is broken or something looks off, we’d appreciate a note.
Onward to decade number 2.
— Jared & Hannah