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PPNF
Tranforming a Paper-Based Health Organization to become an Empowered Digital Force
2016
Technologies
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An open source e-commerce framework, built for Drupal, used to build flexible websites and applications.
Background
Founded in the early 1950s, Price Pottenger Nutrition Foundation (PPNF) is the longest standing nutritional research organization in the US. PPNF wanted to update their brand and website to a more professional, modern experience. PPNF started a re-branding project with our friends at thinkPARALLAX but needed an expert web team to help strategize and execute the digitization of their well established paper journal, along with the transfer and reorganization of the wealth of content on their existing WordPress website.
Challenge
Any project involving a re-branding is always going to have its challenges, especially when working with multiple stakeholders. This project involved a re-branding, a change of the target demographic, and the digitization of a paper-based organization; all for a board of directors comprised of non-digitally savvy retired health professionals. The new website required 3 different e-commerce flows, Store Purchase, Donation, and Membership Signup, which meant extra time and consideration for both UX and engineering.
Result
After much research, careful planning, and hours of engineering and development, the new and improved Price Pottenger website was launched. The new site boasts a modern subscription e-commerce system, which follows current digital content subscription best practices. The back-end is chock-full of advanced management tools, allowing for the easy addition and update of both free and paid content. The site delivers a beautifully responsive experience, no matter what device you are viewing it on. Best of all, PPNF is now a digital force to be reckoned with, complete with a website capable of scaling the organization to new heights for many years to come.
Digital Strategy
We analyzed PPNF's target demographic, along with their existing analytics to develop a customer journey map for their brand. We then researched current digital subscription best practices, and re-structured both their membership tiers and subscription benefits to allign with the successful trends we were seeing. We also provided strategic marketing recommendations for how to attract and grow digital memberships on the new site, giving PPNF the tools to execute on these strategies.
Expert User Experience
Since the design for the website was to be done by the agency in charge of the re-branding, it was very important to have thorough wireframing of the new site experience for both desktop and mobile. Developing a consistent user experience throughout the site created a strong outline to ensure the success of the other agency’s designs.
User Dashboards
The new site featured a user dashboard area where members could see an aggregation of all of the members-only content and courses on the site. The dashboard also included links to other member-only areas of the site, as well as a list of digital product links when those were purchased via the store.
3 Separate E-Commerce Flows
Wireframing and architecting 3 separate e-commerce flows into a single site was a challenge. The new site included a standard store, donations, and membership subscriptions. Ensuring that each flow was optimized and allowed users to jump easily between them required a lot of careful engineering and testing.
Tier-Based Membership Subscriptions
The old site had 6+ different roles for subscribers, and was very confusing for new users to grasp. We optimized PPNF’s subscription model to increase conversions by making the structure simpler and more streamline. The new site includes two different membership tiers (standard & pro) with different access levels for each. Additionally, memberships can be paid for monthly or yearly, with a discount available when purchasing for the full year.
Free Trial Access
Our initial research identified that users are much more likely to sign up for a content subscription membership if they were able to see the content they would be paying for first. We engineered the ability for users to get 30-days free access to the site if they were interested in a membership, increasing the rate of conversion, and decreasing the rate of buyer’s regret.
Flexible Content Managed Section Landing Pages
Section landing pages are generally complex and built using different blocks to feature content and allow the user to find more detailed information. These pages are usually very difficult to manage as they often require hard-coded templates or disconnected administration panels to manage a single page [link to blog]. The new PPNF website features functionally complex landing pages that still give the administrator maximum flexibility while being content-managed from a single place.
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Gated
Content Teaser
In order to encourage memberships and signups for the free trial accounts, we built the content gate to include a teaser to the content as well as a quick way for users to sign in, or sign up in order to access the members-only content. This helped to increase the conversion rate even more, providing potential members with a glimpse of the quality content they were currently missing out on.
Practitioner Finder
Pro Members who are themselves health practitioners, have the ability to add their own office locations to the site via the user dashboard. Once added, their office shows up in a custom searchable Google map for users to find on the site.
Massive
Custom Content Import
The WordPress site that we transferred data from was full of useful content, but the way it was organized was a mess. Not only painful to navigate through on the front-end, but also chaotic on the database side. A plethora of plugins had been used to extend the WP core in order to frankenstein the existing site to life. Trying to extract the existing content and import it into new, separate content types was quite the challenge. Additionally, the client had very ambitious import goals, including scripting existing PDFs into HTML pages, something that required serious finagling.
