- Project Date: September 2020
- Client: Fair Trade USA
- Industry: Nonprofit – International Development
Problem
The initial assignment came to me sounding a little something like this: “The business teams aren’t happy with these five pages of the website. We need to redesign them.” I had a hypothesis that the issue was larger than that. The website, as a whole, had been designed for consumers, so potential business partners were trying to use a tool that wasn’t designed for them.
Analysis
I interviewed stakeholders from across the organization who relied on the functions of the business pages the most, including sales teams, producer services teams, and the front office coordinator*. From there, I created user personas. A simple post-it board in Miro did the trick:
*As a content strategist, I have found few working relationships more valuable than with the person(s) receiving the company’s general contact forms–in this case, the front office coordinator.
Next, I conducted a qualitative audit of the business section of the website by compiling data from Google Analytics, Moz, and the CMS. I gathered interview and audit findings into an analysis summary document. Using the process that Kristina Halvorson outlines in her book Content Strategy for the Web, I grouped my findings into four main categories:
- Target audiences (“Better establishment needed of who the business section of the website is meant to serve.”)
- Messaging (“Needs to be clearer up-front in the business section what main categories of products we certify.”)
- Channels (“Audiences are going through at least five channels to find the resources they need and to provide FTUSA with the information we need.”)
- Workflow/Governance (“There’s a lot of redundancy and duplicate content across pages, making updates more time-consuming than they need to be.”)
- Behavior (“The lead generation form is not inclusive of a major user type, but they’re trying to use it anyway.”)
- SEO (“There is keyword cannibalization happening in several business pages.)
From there, I created a summary of work. I needed to make a case for content strategy to the CMO, since the project scope was beyond what she asked for. My findings from the research and audit stages told me that we needed four things to make the business section of the website a useful tool:
- a defined, agreed-upon goal of the business section of the website,
- website redesign with clearer user journeys,
- migration of content for existing partners into a gated partner portal (which another team was already developing), and
- an ongoing website maintenance plan so that staff felt more empowered to keep the website up to date.
The scope was approved. In retrospect, I learned an important lesson: Include specific resource requirements, and get written approval along with the project scope. Website projects are notoriously underestimated. At the time, I was a one-woman website team. Operating under lean, nonprofit budget constraints, Fair Trade USA had 5 hours per month of contracted web development support to keep the lights on, and a UI designer on contract. While I was able to make a case to double the developer’s hours, I now know that budgeting for such a project is not the same as a parking meter: you can’t just add more time to the meter as you go.
Challenges
- No UI designer on staff. The contractor was under no obligation to accept projects pitched to her.
- 10 hours of web development / month was not enough to get the website redesign done in a timely manner.
- Needing to provide the value of content strategy to leadership.
Results
A new business contact form with a 48% lower bounce rate.
Before (left), the form had 17 fields the user had to fill out on one page, several of which were not relevant to all user types. My redesign (right) separated the form into multiple pages with conditional logic so that the user would only be asked questions that were relevant to them.
A SEO-optimized landing page for business audiences with:
- a 16% lower bounce rate,
- 27% more organic page views, and
- 13% more time spent on the page.
A centralized document download tool that
- consolidated 5 pages containing duplicate content,
- established IA and document taxonomies, and
- increased staff efficiency in the document editing process by 75%.
As a team member, Elise always brought a strategic approach to her work–focusing on a thorough approach to problem-solving rather than just quick temporary fixes. That said, she was also great at fast-turn problem-solving and building site pages quickly. She is a unique combination of a great writer, but also an invaluable resource for so many other aspects and formats required for the delivery of great content.
Anna Banks, former CMO of Fair Trade USA