Boston Athletic Association
They’re the stewards of the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon and a bucket-list goal for runners everywhere. But BAA is more than a single race. They organize seven major events each year, run community programming across Greater Boston, and have raised millions for charity. Their mission is simple: help people experience the joy of running.
Their website wasn’t telling that story.
Information lived across multiple platforms: the Athletes’ Village (behind a login), a third-party FAQ tool, scattered PDF documents, and the website itself. Runners preparing for race day had to hunt across all of them. 24 years of race results were spread across different vendor sites, each with its own interface. And with over 60% of visitors on mobile, the experience fell short of the world-class standard BAA sets for everything else they do.
The challenge wasn’t attracting runners. The Boston Marathon always has a waitlist. The challenge was creating a digital experience that matched the prestige of the event itself.
mobile engagement rate
mobile session duration
engagement rate across all devices
With 61% of BAA’s audience on mobile, the redesign prioritized that experience. Mobile engagement rate jumped 32%, and average session duration increased 36%. The gap between mobile and desktop engagement narrowed from 19 percent to just 4.
A running site doesn’t sit still. In the weeks before a race, the homepage is about logistics: registration, qualifying, training resources. On race day, it’s about live tracking, road closures, and spectator info. After the finish, it’s about results, photos, and celebration. The new BAA.org is built to transform through these phases. Staff can shift the homepage and race pages from to adapt from “preparation mode” to “race day mode” to “celebration mode” quickly, without developer support. A modular system designed for a site that changes as often as the events it supports.
BAA’s visual identity is iconic, the blue-and-yellow of the Boston Marathon is recognized worldwide. But a brand built for finish lines needed room to breathe across a complex digital experience. We expanded the color palette to soften the intensity for everyday browsing, introduced typography that works harder for the dense informational content runners depend on, and developed bib-inspired layout components that give each page a dynamic, modular feel. The result is a site that’s unmistakably BAA, but built for the screen and not the racecourse.
BAA doesn’t run one event. They run seven. From the Marathon to the 5K to the Invitational Mile, each race has its own audience, schedule, and personality. The new site gives every race a dedicated experience that feels like its own homepage, with distinct visual identity within the BAA system. A runner checking in on the Half Marathon doesn’t feel like they’ve landed on a subsection, they feel like they’ve arrived.
A site that’s essentially eight destinations in one needs navigation that doesn’t overwhelm. We designed two layers: an organization-wide menu (tucked behind a hamburger, opening down the left side) and a race-specific navigation across the top of each race page. That race-level nav keeps the event name large and prominent, reinforcing the homepage feeling. Runners stay oriented within their race. Visitors exploring the broader organization can always get there.
The old site had critical race information spread across the website, a third-party knowledge base, PDFs, and emails. The new BAA.org consolidates everything into dedicated “Info For” pages — for athletes, volunteers, and spectators — organized by phase: how to qualify, how to register, how to prepare, what to expect on race day. No more hunting. One destination, from qualifying standards to start line logistics.
The new Race Results tool brings decades of finish times into a single, searchable experience. It’s vendor-agnostic by design. BAA can upload results from any timing partner, and runners get a consistent interface whether they’re looking up a 2024 finish or a 2001 personal best. In the first 81 days after launch, runners searched results over 136,000 times.
The Clinton Foundation
TNTP + TNTP Teaching fellows
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