The American Liver Foundation is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to provide information and resources for people with liver disease. They provide support to patients, caregivers and medical professionals.

We’ve been working with ALF since 2009 when we were first brought in to fill the void created when a staff webmaster took leave to finish a medical degree. Since then our role has evolved from merely taking direction to manage content on the public facing website, liverfoundation.org, to developing strategies for driving traffic and managing content. In addition to these responsibilities we have since taken on the management roles for 2 additional micro websites he123.org and hepc123.org as well as management of the organization’s intranet, liverworks.org.

As part of the management of the organization’s public-facing website we interfaced with individuals from the New York headquarters as well as the Executive Directors and their staff from each of the national Division offices, helping manage the content for those websites as well. Over time, our role as consultant grew from website planning and management to all aspects of utilizing technology and marketing to help the organization achieve it’s goals including webinar production.

Website Redesign

The steps taken to reinvent the website included…

  1. Establishing 3 tiers of working teams made up of key stakeholders from inside the organization, from patient volunteers, from caregivers and from medical professionals
  2. Establish rigorous project management protocols
  3. Created teams of individuals to work on strategy, branding, content management, fundraising, data collection, wire frame design, site map planning, content inventory and stakeholder insights
  4. Created a user experience vision statement
  5. Conducted a SWOT analysis
  6. Identified and interviewed key stakeholders
  7. Researched competition best practices
  8. Defined purpose
  9. Identified goals & objectives
  10. Established patient-centricity as key
  11. Conducted usability survey
  12. Designed site map and page wire frames
  13. Built site prototype
  14. Migrate content
  15. Test
  16. Launch

Liverfoundation.org first launched in 2005, an eternity in internet years. The website continued to grow at times like a snowball rolling downhill without regard for long-term strategy. A lean organization to begin with, ALF had always believed that in order to make a change to modernize the website would take substantial financial investment from donors to help bring them into the 21st century. Beginning in 2015, a concentrated effort was made to convince senior leadership that such a change was possible and without substantial involvement from outside agencies and without making the change a financial burden on the organization.

Work was begun in 2016 involving a well thought out strategy and involving all key stakeholders and constituents. On December 1, 2017 the new website was launched enabling the organization the flexibility to reach new markets and target messaging to these constituent audiences.

Micro Website and Intranet Site Design and Content Management

As part of our relationship with the American Liver Foundation we also manage the content for the organization’s internal website as well as two sponsor supported micro websites for specific liver disease types.