Asia Internet Coalition
The Asia Internet Coalition speaks for the world's largest internet companies on policy across Asia Pacific. We designed and built the WordPress platform that turns its years of policy submissions into a filterable library, and we have hosted and maintained it ever since.
A WordPress rebuild that organised hundreds of policy submissions, statements and reports into a library filterable by country, topic and document type, still running on the same Chillybin build four years after launch.
The Challenge
What we were solving
The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) is the industry association for the internet economy in Asia Pacific. Founded in 2010 and run from Singapore, it represents the major global internet and technology companies in policy conversations with governments across the region, from data protection consultations in Vietnam to digital tax proposals in Pakistan.
An association like this produces one thing above all: documents. Policy submissions, statements, press releases and commissioned reports, published continuously across 19 markets plus the G20, on topics from artificial intelligence to content regulation to cross-border data flows. That archive is the association's institutional memory and its public evidence of work done. On the old site it was hard to get at.
The audience is unforgiving in a specific way. A regulator's staffer checking AIC's position before a consultation closes, a journalist on deadline, a policy lead at a member company preparing a briefing: none of them will page through a chronological news feed to find a two-year-old submission on data localisation. And an organisation that speaks for companies which set the global standard for digital products cannot present itself on a website that feels a generation behind them.
AIC engaged Chillybin in mid 2022. Success meant any visitor finding the association's position on any issue, in any market, within a few clicks, on a site the small secretariat team could publish to without a developer.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Design around the documents, not the brochure
The scoped design work was deliberately narrow: two page designs, the homepage and the policy library. That ratio says where the value sits. Most association sites treat the archive as an afterthought behind the mission statement; here the library was treated as the product, with search and filtering designed in from the first wireframe rather than bolted on later.
Underneath it we modelled the association's actual output as structured content: members, team, workstreams, policies, reports and media (press releases, statements and webinars), plus a blog. Every document type carries the same classification, which is what makes the filtering work.
Built to be filtered, built to be read by everyone
The build runs on WordPress with the Beaver Builder framework and a custom child theme. The policy library is powered by Search & Filter Pro, letting visitors cut the archive three ways at once: by resource type (policy submissions, press releases, reports, statements), by policy area (15 categories) and by country (19 markets plus the G20). PDFs are served through a managed downloads system rather than loose media files, so documents stay organised as the library grows. Gravity Forms handles enquiries, and the performance stack (Perfmatters and server-side caching) keeps a document-heavy site quick.
Accessibility was a named deliverable, not a nice-to-have: design and development were scoped to WCAG guidelines from the kickoff. A body that lobbies governments on an open and inclusive internet has to clear that bar on its own front door.
Delivery ran on a nine-week timeline, with the site moving onto Chillybin hosting and a Website Care plan at launch.
The Solution
What we delivered
Four years on, the site is still the one we built (same theme, same framework, same library) and the archive has kept growing under it, with documents now spanning September 2018 to mid 2025 across every market AIC works in. The secretariat publishes submissions, statements and reports without touching a developer, and each new document slots into the country and topic filters automatically.
That is the quiet result that matters for an association: the website has kept pace with the advocacy. AIC's positions on the region's live policy fights are findable by the people who need them, and the platform has carried a continuous publishing cadence since 2022 on nothing more than a standard care plan.
What we learned
For an industry association, the website is the archive. The temptation is to spend the design budget on the mission pages, but AIC's credibility lives in the hundreds of documents that prove the work. Getting the taxonomy right (type, topic and country as independent filters) was the real design decision; the visual layer just had to stay out of its way.
Longevity is an outcome too. A build that still serves its purpose four years later, under constant publishing across 19 markets, is evidence of well-chosen foundations: a mainstream framework, proven plugins, and a content model that anticipated growth instead of matching a snapshot. Nothing on this project was exotic, and that is why it has lasted.
