Heart disease touches each one of us at some point in our lives. The statistics on heart disease in America are staggering. It is the leading cause of death in the United States and globally. In America, 26.6 million people are diagnosed with heart disease each year. Every 34 seconds, an American will have a coronary event and over 600,000 will die from one each year. Enter The Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF), the leading healthcare research nonprofit dedicated to helping doctors improve the lives of people suffering from heart and vascular disease. In need of a digital transformation strategy and a new website design for the healthcare nonprofit’s flagship online presence, The Cardiovascular Research Foundation needed a web design firm that specialized in research-driven, content-heavy website design for healthcare nonprofits.
CRF had a tough challenge ahead of them. TCTMD is an enormous nonprofit website filled with thousands of pages of specialized healthcare content—healthcare research, videos, conference slide presentations, cardiovascular healthcare news, and more. While it was filled with valuable content, the site’s infrastructure was complex, complicated, and out-of-date. A paid member-driven website, TCTMD required deep integration with multiple platforms like Salesforce, Okta and Britecove, meaning making sense of the technical terrain would be tough before any website design work could begin. And everything had to be done in 6 months for CRF’s largest annual conference.
So, with no time to waste, both of our teams jumped in with two feet to remake the nonprofit healthcare leader’s website—and, in doing so, transform how it advanced its mission.
Before Redesign: A Nonprofit Healthcare Research Website in Need of Serious Treatment
With just one significant redesign in its 16-year history, TCTMD was a healthcare nonprofit website from a bygone era. On the back-end, CRF’s data was stuck on an expensive, proprietary Ektron CMS that made it impossible for the healthcare research nonprofit’s editorial team to publish and manage content on their website. TCTMD’s system failed to support the complexity of its content relationships, site search was ineffective, and integration with Salesforce for gated member-only content was clunky and error-prone. To users, the content-heavy website suffered with a confusing taxonomy and navigation that made finding content a chore, visual design made scanning pages and long-form reads uninspiring, and the TCTMD brand failed to embody front-of-field interventional cardiology news and education.
A New Digital Strategy to Drive Engagement With Specialized Healthcare Research Content
TCTMD is truly an encyclopedic website, with tens of thousands of slide presentations, news articles, and videos. The key to success in designing content-heavy nonprofit websites starts with digital strategy and content strategy. And with thousands of pieces of content to make sense of, we quickly got to work understanding the nonprofit website, from multiple perspectives. Discussions with TCTMD’s leadership and editorial team informed goals, pain points, and priorities. A content audit showed how volumes of content were organized. Focus groups, user surveys, and user profiles clarified what was most important to audiences.
An in-depth analysis of CRF’s digital ecosystem detailed the network of connected systems in the nonprofit’s technology infrastructure—and opportunities for us to improve both the user experience and operational efficiencies. Peer analysis placed TCTMD in context to competitors in its space. After learning from CRF’s team, we developed a digital strategy that provided our roadmap for uniting branding, content, design and technology into an nonprofit website that would make a meaningful difference for how The Cardiovascular Research Foundation advances healthcare.
Architecting a User Experience That Delivers Greater Value and Drives Revenue
When it comes to designing research-heavy nonprofit websites, there are best practices to driving content engagement. And in designing the user experience for TCTMD, one of our top priorities was to expose readers who typically visit for one type of content to the volumes of valuable, related content that The Cardiovascular Research Foundation has to offer healthcare experts from its other departments. In particular, TCTMD is a rare membership and community nonprofit website that relies on paid advertising to drive the revenue that supports its programming. Given the volume of news and educational content in TCTMD, this meant developing a content taxonomy that supported existing content and planned for growth, displaying a breadth of relevant options in every view, and not over-stuffing pages and bombarding users to ensure a great reading experience across devices.
With thousands of pieces of specialized content for audiences to engage with, making sure that TCTMD’s website search was exceptional at delivering the results that people were looking for was critical. To ensure content accessibility, we rearchitected the nonprofit website’s search with powerful faceting and filtering search tools powered by SOLR, delivering rapid, accurate results search results.
Designing a Logo & Branding That Resonates With Healthcare Experts
Like most major website redesigns, designing TCTMD for The Cardiovascular Research Foundation was both an opportunity to design a great nonprofit website for the healthcare sector and to strengthen the TCTMD brand so that it would stand out among it’s peers like TheHeart.corg by Medscape. Working within CRF’s master brand guidelines for the parent brand, we collaborated with CRF’s team on a rebranding for TCTMD that provided the visual foundation we needed. Two key considerations for designing effective nonprofit branding for The Cardiovascular Research Foundation were ensuring that TCTMD worked within CRF’s master brand, and that its new visual identity would support a brand architecture for TCTMD sub-brands and departments. The resulting design modernizes TCTMD’s brand, while a color and typography system and sub-brand identities provide the structure needed to support brand consistency across all communications in different media and venues.
Designing a Nonprofit Healthcare Website that Strengthens Connections to the Brand
With TCTMD’s new logo and branding in place to guide website design, we transformed our wireframes and technical specifications into a a content-driven nonprofit website experience that ensures legibility, accessibility, and deeper engagement with everything that The Cardiovascular Research Foundation has to offer. In keeping with TCTMD’s status as a leading nonprofit website for interventional cardiology news and education, design emphasizes best practices in news and media website design so that TCTMD stands up, stands out, and stands for something among it’s peer set of other healthcare nonprofit websites.
Because of its volumes of long-form content, in particular, Constructive’s team designed TCTMD with a careful, structured typographic hierarchy that makes content scannable, elevates top-level takeaways, and encourages readers to go deeper into the nonprofit website’s extensive content on cardiovascular healthcare. A clear and clean design that establishes a strong visual hierarchy increases usability by making clear what TCTMD’s different editorial departments, topics, and formats are to guide users through the website’s content-heavy pages. And videos and presentations, two of TCTMD’s most valuable types of content, are elevated with calls-to-action that focus attention on member-only content to help drive subscriptions.
Designing a Robust Infrastructure for Digital Transformation
Digital transformation may be all the rage in business settings, but the truth is that digital transformation for nonprofits is an enormous opportunity to streamline service and improve the brand experience. We built TCTMD in Drupal to ensure that the system could handle the large number of complex integrations with The Cardiovascular Research Foundation’s external technology infrastructure. The website makes it easy for subscribers to login using Single-Sign-On, providing tiered member accounts based on the level of subscription and centralized user management control for CRF’s staff. On the content side, TCT provides public content and members-only content access, extensive multimedia content—from video and streaming to automated presentation processing from annual conferences, SOLR search, and custom application APIs.
As one of the top-rated websites in the cardiovascular healthcare sector, TCTMD is also a website that’s visited by thousands of people every day—meaning it needed to effortlessly push all of its media content without slowing down. To meet the need, Constructive’s technology team worked closely with TCTMD to select hosting and complementary technology partners to architect a cloud-based infrastructure to handle the load and evolve with their needs—creating a highly-available, scalable infrastructure with automated deployments, elastic scaling, healing, notification, and more.
The Results
“Constructive completely understood the challenges we were facing in our space. Instead of only having one person be familiar with our project, it seemed that the entire Constructive team was fully invested in making our success be theirs, and vice versa. Their entire team made itself fully available to us, often going above-and-beyond to make our launch successful. We didn’t feel like we hired a company to perform a website redesign, but rather found a partner to work with us and bring our vision to life.”
Stephanie Gutch, Sr. Director of Digital, Cardiovascular Research Foundation
Learn More About Our Work
Get an up-close and detailed look at this project in our visual case study or explore Constructive’s design for healthcare & social services nonprofits.
