Think Tanks
More think tanksare choosing one personover an agency.
I'm Paolo Resteghini. Seven years working in the think tank and policy space, twenty-three in design and development. Design, build, and the systems behind them, all from one person, which keeps things simple and keeps the cost down. Based in Sarasota, Florida.
44 five-star reviews, Top Rated on Upwork
Already in this movement
Where each of these stands today, labelled plainly rather than dressed up.
Georgia Center for Opportunity
OngoingWebsite redesign, four production applications, donations wired into Salesforce, and an AI bug pipeline for non-technical staff.
Empower Mississippi
In buildA navigation-first refresh so op-eds, research and EPIC policy work each get their own home, staying in WordPress, so the team keeps publishing exactly as they do today.
Parents First Initiative
parentsfirstinitiative.comCompletedBuilt and delivered.
A national teachers association
In buildThe platform behind their member-facing site, audited and now being rebuilt. Named on request.
Alliance for Opportunity
allianceforopportunity.comPre planningScoped, ahead of planning.
+ 2 more in proposal.
Anchor client
Georgia Center for Opportunity
The website turned out to be the beginning rather than the job. Five systems later, we are still working together.
The website
foropportunity.org
A full redesign of the public site, live today.
- Op-eds, articles and reports each got their own content type and template, instead of one undifferentiated pile.
- A research archive merged into Reports, with every old URL redirected rather than dropped.
- Page titles, descriptions and structured data set properly across the templates.
- WordPress
- Elementor
- SEO & schema
Benefits Cliffs
benefitscliffs.org
The calculator itself: model a household, and see exactly where the cliffs fall.
- Build a household, adults, children, income and housing, then plot net income from work and benefits against earnings.
- Every vertical drop on that chart is a cliff: the point where a raise costs a family more in lost benefits than it gains in pay.
- Programs toggle on and off and the scenario recalculates, saves and exports. Free accounts, plus a public API for researchers.
- The numbers behind it come from a policy database of 137 tables, kept current by hand until LEDGE.
- Laravel
- Public API
- Multi-state data
One adult, two children, Mississippi. Net income from work and benefits, against what the same household would take home on earnings alone.
$55,372net earnings + benefits, just before the cliff
Total benefits $27,323
- Net earnings
- $28,049
- Refundable tax credits
- $1,554
- Food assistance
- $3,231
- Medical assistance
- $11,020
- Child care subsidy
- $7,464
- Section 8 housing
- $4,053
$3,231 lost at $33,000 of earnings: a raise that leaves the household worse off.
Donations
donate.foropportunity.org
Their own giving platform, wired into the CRM they already run on.
- One-off and recurring giving, receipts, and a donor record that survives the transaction.
- Every gift lands in Salesforce linked to the right contact, so development stops reconciling by hand.
- Stripe for one-off and recurring cards, queued and retried rather than fire-and-forget, and security-audited before it took a live card.
- Laravel 12
- Vue 3
- Stripe
- Salesforce
- Horizon
- Donor givesCard, one-off or recurring
- Laravel records itQueued, retried, receipted
- Salesforce, linkedMatched to the right contact, not a duplicate
Salesforce · contact
Matched to the existing contact, so no duplicate was created.
Better Work
betteropportunity.org
The system behind the jobs programme: applicants, employers and training partners.
- Job-seekers apply to Jobs for Life classes online instead of on paper.
- Employers and community partners get their own routes in, rather than one shared form.
- Staff can see who applied, who started and who finished, which is what funders ask about.
- AI writes a summary of each application, so staff read a paragraph instead of a form.
- Laravel
- Livewire
- OpenAI
- Application portal
LEDGE
Internal
An AI pipeline that reads welfare policy documents and extracts the numbers a benefits model runs on. Built for every program, every state, every year.
- Federal memos and state charts in; specific parameter values out, into a 137-table policy database.
- Every value carries its source page, the exact quote it came from, and a confidence score.
- Nothing lands without a human approving it. The pipeline proposes, a reviewer decides.
- Designed for the end state from day one: onboarding another program or state is configuration, not new code.
- SNAP in Georgia for FY2023 is the first use case, not the ceiling. The target is two dozen programs across fifty states, refreshed as policy changes.
- Python
- LLM extraction
- Human-in-the-loop
- Postgres
- Source
- Extract
- Review
- Land
- Value
- 1.30
- Applies to
- Georgia · FY2023
- Source
- SNAP COLA memo, p.4
- Quote
- "130 percent of the federal poverty guidelines"
Approvedby a human, before it lands
- 137 tables
- 50 states
- Every year
Paolo is truly a unicorn in the tech space. Not only is he incredibly skilled as a developer, but he also has incredible communication skills and takes the time to walk clients through the sometimes complicated, nuanced world of AI to ensure that they feel comfortable with the solutions he is recommending and building. He is responsive, quick, creative and provides overall excellent service. 11/10 recommend; will be hiring again.
Kelsey UnderwoodVP of Strategy, Georgia Center for OpportunityCase study · in build
Empower Mississippi
Their writing was never the problem. The structure around it dated from 2017, and that is what we are changing. Here is the old site, and the new one.
The old site: strong writing, one undifferentiated list
An op-ed, a research report, a press release and a podcast episode all arrive in the same list, looking identical. A legislator who came for the evidence has no way to tell them apart, so it is easy to leave before finding it.
The new site: same writing, sorted by who came for it
Every audience gets one route of its own, and the evidence is separated from the commentary rather than queued behind it. Giving stops being a hand-off to a payment page: the gift is chosen on the page it was asked for.
Shown in build, with permission. Not yet launched.
Read the full Empower Mississippi case studyThe whole rebuild on one page: what the old site cost the people it was written for, what I changed and why, and every number measured on both sides of it. Almost twenty-five seconds to first use became four.What this normally costs, and what it costs with me
Same scope, priced two ways. The agency figures are published ones, so you can check them.
Five ways I can help
Most engagements start with one of these and grow into the others. What sits under each, plainly.
Websites & information architecture
Good research deserves a home where people can actually find it.
- A new site, a full redesign, or a refresh of the one you already have
- WordPress, Webflow, Framer, or hand-built where that serves you better
- Sitemap and navigation first, so op-eds, research and policy each get their own home
- Migrations, accessibility and speed work on a site you are keeping
Design & branding
Work that looks as considered as the thinking behind it.
- Brand identity: logo, colour, type, and a short set of rules your team can actually follow
- UX and interface design, drawn and agreed before anything gets built
- Report, deck and one-pager templates so your publications look like they came from one place
- A design system your future site and tools inherit, rather than starting over each time
Measurement & analytics
A clear picture of who is arriving, and what is worth doing next.
- Google Tag Manager and GA4 set up properly, with the conversions that matter actually firing
- Search Console read for you, and turned into a short list of things worth doing
- SEO and AEO: schema and structure so AI answers quote your work
- A plain-English read of what moved each month, with no dashboard to learn
Bespoke systems
When the work needs a tool that does not exist yet, I can build it.
- Calculators and interactive models, like the Benefits Cliffs calculator and its public API
- Program and application portals, like Better Work, where applicants, employers and partners each get their own way in
- Donation and membership flows that land in Salesforce, or whichever CRM you already run
- Internal tools and dashboards for the parts of the job still living in spreadsheets
AI automation
Quiet help with the internal work that eats into your team's week.
- Bug and request intake that non-technical staff find easy
- Weekly and monthly reporting, written in plain English
- Content pipelines: transcripts, summaries, drafts, repurposing
- Document and data extraction, with a person approving every record
Something else
If what you need is not on this list, or is smaller than the figures above, please ask anyway.
A measurement setup, a single landing page, an audit, a migration: those are one piece of work each, quoted on their own and priced nothing like a full build.
Start a conversation
Who you would be working with
Seven years in the think tank and policy space, twenty-three in design and development. I have built the public sites, the calculators the research sits on, the donation plumbing and the staff tools behind them, so we can start from how a policy shop actually runs rather than from a discovery deck.
The range is the point: UX and interface design, frontend, backend, and the AI tooling around them. The person who understands the problem in the meeting is the one who writes the code, so an idea stays intact from the first sketch to launch.
Award-winning, with work featured on the BBC and in The Guardian, and clients from startups to Booking.com and Uber.
Tell me what you're working on
A couple of lines is plenty to start with. I'll get back to you the same day, and the first call is half an hour, just a conversation about what you're trying to do. If I turn out not to be the right fit, I'll tell you early and help you find someone who is.
Prefer email? hello@paolor.co.uk
- A reply from me, the same day wherever I can.
- Half an hour to talk it through and see whether there's a project here.
- A written scope and a fixed price, within a week.