People Who Need People

Before the redesign, message boards and other interactivecommunity forums were located in just one area, on aseparate subsite of Cancer.org. James Miller, ACS's directorof Internet strategy, says that community was such animportant aspect of Cancer.org that ACS wanted to weavecommunity features throughout the site. No matter wheresomeone affected by cancer was on Cancer.org, she couldeasily find her way to a chat room or message board.

To determine how the site should be redesigned to suitusers' needs, ACS worked with Cambridge, Mass.-based systemsintegrator Sapient. Members of the two organizationsvirtually lived with cancer patients for a week to learnabout their lives, the information they needed and thesupport they sought. Based on that experience, they drew upscenarios illustrating why a person visits Cancer.org andhow they move through the site. For example, they determinedthat Joe - a hypothetical individual recently diagnosed withprostate cancer - would first come to Cancer.org looking forbasic information about the disease and treatment, so ACSput those links on the homepage. He might then be interestedin finding out about support groups near where he lives, soACS put a search function on the homepage where Joe couldenter his ZIP code and find out about events in hiscommunity. Joe can also find out about support services whenhe links to general information on prostatecancer. Eventually, Joe will want to know what questions heshould ask his doctor, or what he should be monitoringduring his treatment. ACS decided that it was best for himto get this advice from fellow patients and survivors, so itput links to chat rooms and bulletin boards both on itshomepage and on pages with information on the disease.

Even before the redesign, the ACS chat rooms and messageboards were immensely popular, accounting for 27 percent ofthe traffic to the site, according to Miller. Eighteenpercent of the user population was active in discussions onan ongoing basis, he says. (As CIO went to print, Miller wasstill configuring the site's reporting software and didn'thave usage numbers for the community forums on the newsite.)

ACS's community-building also has a bottom-linecomponent. Miller says creating a sense of community amongACS's constituents helps the organization grow itsrelationships with them. "If someone comes to us and isinterested in volunteering, we want to convert them intosomeone who also donates. If someone comes to us looking forgeneral health information, we want to convert them tosomebody who volunteers for us," he says.

Offering a sense of community also ties people to ACS andits mission. Miller says ACS's constituents have a sense ofloyalty to the organization because they're a part of thewebsite's community. "For a nonprofit, that means you'realways going to be at the top of a person's mind when theystart thinking about donations," he says.