Atheist Census

The client

Atheist Alliance International is a global alliance of atheist and freethought groups and individuals. It promotes secularism around the world and helps people affected by persecution by theocratic states.

The challenge

AAI wanted to count the world’s atheists: where they are, their ages and genders, their education and the religion, if any, they were raised in. Then make that picture freely available, so non-religious people can show they are present in their own countries.

Nothing off the shelf could do it, so we built the application from scratch on the CodeIgniter framework, and have since rebuilt it on the framework’s latest version. With more than 290,000 participants, it is believed to be the largest survey of its kind.

• One person, one entry: every submission is confirmed by email, and unconfirmed entries are deleted after 24 hours.
• Private by design: once an entry is confirmed, the email address is stored in one-way encrypted form, so it cannot be read back even if the database were compromised. For people in countries where atheism is dangerous, that matters.
• Data anyone can use: results are aggregated by country, and anyone can generate a country report.
• Ten languages: Czech, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Polish, Russian, Slovak and Spanish.

Studio Excel set out the key parameters of the web design project clearly, explained the options and limitations for the website, developed exactly what we wanted and delivered work on or ahead of schedule.

Tanya Smith, AAI, Melbourne