Executive Summary
The National Gaucher Foundation (NGF), a nonprofit organization that supports U.S. patients with Gaucher disease and their caregivers, encountered a content conundrum in late 2015. Their web content was outdated, wordy, full of medical jargon and poorly organized. Patients and caregivers were craving better content.
In 2016, Aha Media Group (Aha Media) rewrote NGF’s web content to highlight key strengths and differentiators. To maintain communication between NGF and the Gaucher community, NGF continued working with Aha Media to create high-quality blog content.
NGF’s new web content and blog resulted in direct ROI. Online donations doubled since developing the web content and launching the blog.
Among them was a $1,000 unsolicited donation from a couple who came across the NGF website when they thought their grandson had Gaucher disease. Even though he was ultimately healthy, the couple made a donation because of their positive experience with NGF’s website – which provided informative, reassuring and supportive content.
Stats
NGF Significantly Increased Engagement with Its Community
%
Increase in traffic referred from organic search
%
Increase in multiple-page sessions
%
Increase in visitors
%
Increase in online donations
The Challenge
NGF is the only organization in the United States committed to supporting patients with Gaucher disease and their caregivers – underscoring the need for NGF to deliver findable, engaging content.
In early 2016, NGF conducted an in-depth needs assessment to determine their audience’s interests. Often, people visited once and didn’t return because the information was complex and outdated. NGF needed to give its audience accessible content on managing the disease, as well as information on news and current research.
Aha Media’s Approach
NGF’s newly developed web content provides targeted, helpful information, but it was not designed to address all the topics of interest. Blogging provides a way to cover a range of topics while driving traffic to other parts of the website. NGF identified blog post topics by paying attention to their audience: search trends related to Gaucher and comments on their Facebook page. The Aha Media editorial team takes those topics and executes:
Research
Conducts thorough background research and interviews subject matter experts.
Custom Content
Writes custom content that incorporates search engine-optimized (SEO) terms and calls to action.
Collabortation
Finalizes the content with the NGF team and subject matter experts.
Amy Blum
The Results
When writing the blog content, Aha Media writers and editors focus on:
Applying web writing and SEO best practices
Diving deeper into Gaucher disease-related topics and empowering followers with new information
Lessons Learned
- Blogging improves the search results of content across your website. With interesting topics and effective internal links, you can guide readers to go further on their journey.
- Create online communities for your readers, and pay attention to their conversations. Online discussions on NGF’s Facebook page often spark new ideas for blog posts.
- Set up a workable publishing schedule. NGF decided that a monthly cadence was doable, and they’ve been consistent for more than a year. When organizations create an aggressive publishing schedule that they can’t keep, it can confuse readers and decrease engagement.