The Client
The Investment Company Institute (ICI) is the leading association representing regulated investment funds, including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, closed-end funds, and unit investment trusts. As the authoritative voice of the asset management industry, ICI serves a broad and diverse audience of members, policymakers, regulators, and the general public, publishing research reports, papers, statistical releases, and blog posts annually through its flagship platform, ICI.org.
The Situation
ICI needed its website to deliver a consistent, high-performing digital experience at scale for a broad and diverse set of audiences, including members, policymakers, regulators, and internal teams. As ICI's front door, the website needed to support a growing volume of content, increasingly complex user needs, and sustained organizational growth — while remaining reliable, secure, and easy to manage.
The organization's legacy platform hadn't been designed to handle the scale or cadence of publishing the organization needed, nor the breadth of its user base. Outdated code, fragile components, and tightly coupled functionality made even simple sitewide updates risky, often resulting in broken links and failing components. The search was ineffective, and the overall user experience did not consistently guide users to the most relevant, high-value information. These limitations hindered engagement, reduced efficiency, and constrained ICI's ability to operate as a modern, authoritative digital leader.
ICI's core objectives were to:
- Strengthen brand loyalty and credibility by positioning ICI.org as a strategic digital platform and authoritative industry resource
- Build a future-ready digital foundation capable of supporting ongoing optimization and growth
- Increase publishing agility by reducing the manual effort required to format and publish a high volume of research and policy content
- Increase engagement with high-value content within a library of more than 50,000 pieces
- Significantly reduce the time and effort required for users to find relevant, current information.
The Challenge
ICI needed to overcome several interconnected business and technology challenges that hindered its ability to deliver a clear, scalable digital experience to its audiences.
Search and content discovery were the most visible pain points. The existing search experience frequently surfaced outdated or irrelevant materials, lacked meaningful filtering, and struggled to prioritize high-value content — which increased time-to-information for users and eroded confidence in ICI.org as an authoritative resource. Compounding this, years of accumulated legacy content had created significant content sprawl. Without consistent taxonomy, metadata standards, or archival strategies, high-value research and policy papers were routinely buried beneath low-impact material.
On the technical side, the legacy implementation didn’t fully leverage Acquia and Drupal best practices, limiting performance, search effectiveness, and extensibility. The Drupal platform also served as a downstream repository for the organization's entire CRM user population, including inactive and legacy accounts. Continuous synchronization of large volumes of user records inflated user tables and access-control data, creating slow, resource-intensive processes and performance degradation across authentication, content access checks, and scheduled jobs.
Serving multiple important audiences — members, policymakers, regulators, and the general public — within a single platform added further complexity. The lack of clear audience pathways made it difficult to balance simplicity with depth, resulting in a fragmented experience that failed to consistently guide users to the most relevant information. Internally, multiple teams with different priorities and workflows created and managed content, requiring shared governance models and content standards to deliver a cohesive experience without slowing publishing velocity.
The Solution
ICI engaged Acquia partner Tactis to transform ICI.org into a modern, scalable digital experience. More than a visual refresh, the project addressed foundational experience, content, and platform challenges that limited the site's effectiveness as an authoritative, user-centric resource.
Following a comprehensive discovery phase, Tactis analyzed existing code, content, and platform architecture and gathered full requirements from stakeholders across the organization. A deep audit of content structures informed a deliberate migration strategy, enabling the team to recreate essential content types in a more streamlined, consistent manner. Tactis rebuilt existing views to align with new editorial and user experience requirements and developed a completely new Drupal theme to support the redesigned interface and ensure long-term flexibility.
Given ICI's complex access requirements, Tactis reimplemented ICI's security model to fully leverage Drupal's built-in security framework, improving performance while maintaining strict access controls consistently across all pages, views, and search results. To support scale and performance, the team split a single legacy database into two separate applications using Drupal's domain module and multi-site capabilities, improving maintainability and laying the groundwork for future growth.
The team also significantly enhanced authentication and user management, implementing a Microsoft-based, passwordless two-factor authentication solution that reduced administrative overhead while improving security and ease of use. Tactis reintegrated user provisioning to support on-demand account creation driven by data from ICI's Microsoft Dynamics infrastructure.
Tactis delivered the platform on Acquia Cloud Platform, establishing a dedicated development environment that allowed the team to iterate independently without impacting the live site. They also implemented Acquia Cloud Edge to protect performance and reliability at scale, safeguarding the site from malicious traffic and automated bot activity.
Tactis subsequently leveraged the same Acquia-based foundation, content models, and components to rebuild IDC.org as a cohesive extension of ICI's digital ecosystem, alongside three additional Drupal/Acquia multi-site implementations — demonstrating the architecture’s reusability and scalability.
The Results
The launch of the redesigned ICI.org delivered strong, measurable improvements across engagement, performance, reach, and operational efficiency.
Overall engagement grew dramatically. Engagement sessions increased 234% year over year, total page views rose 217%, and repeat visitors increased 164%, indicating that the new information architecture, navigation, and content design significantly improved discoverability and usability at scale. Organic traffic directly to the website reached 61%, signaling stronger brand recognition and sustained audience loyalty.
The platform also expanded ICI's global reach. Year-over-year international user growth reached 315% in the UK, 144% in India, and 135% in Japan, underscoring the platform's ability to serve a growing international audience with consistent performance and experience.
For members, the redesigned site introduced a personalized dashboard tailored to individual subscriptions, the ability to bookmark frequently accessed content, and visibility into upcoming committee meetings — alongside a more secure and streamlined authentication experience. Together, these enhancements drove a 35% increase in member logins.
Security and reliability also saw significant improvements. Following the implementation of Acquia Cloud Edge, bot attacks were reduced by 90%, improving site performance and stability.
Operationally, reusable components and structured content models reduced the effort required to upload and publish content by 40%, freeing staff time for higher-value work and enabling faster delivery of critical information. Customer support requests related to content access and technical issues declined by 15%, reflecting a more intuitive platform that reduces friction at scale.
Although the site has been live for only a short time, the architecture already enables rapid iteration. Initiatives underway include advanced data visualization, additional child sites on the same branded platform, and a centralized directory of member resources, ensuring the digital experience continues to grow in sophistication and reach without sacrificing performance.