Epilepsy Foundation

The Client

Dedicated to the welfare of people with epilepsy and seizure disorders, the Epilepsy Foundation is a non-profit national foundation headquartered in Landover, Maryland. Established in 1968, the foundation now has a network of 59 affiliates. Its programs include educational, counseling, referral, and employment assistance, in addition to advisory and youth programs and training grants.

The Situation

The Epilepsy Foundation’s website needed to assist people affected with epilepsy and seizure disorders. But the site’s previous maintenance costs, coupled with security concerns, meant that a new site was in order. The Epilepsy Foundation needed a site that offered seamless integration to its CRM built on a platform that could build progressive customer profiles. Additionally, the web team wanted to increase site engagement and user conversion, ultimately increasing the customer’s lifetime value. 

The Challenge

The Epilepsy Foundation’s previous website faced a number of challenges. Not only was the user experience poor, but so was the experience for site developers, with complex code architecture and code maintenance making updates tedious. And the site’s SEO and organic search metrics indicated they were missing the mark— security loopholes and slow site load speeds led to a less-than-stellar experience for users. Clearly, there was room for improvement on the Epilepsy Foundation’s site. 

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The Solution

Working with Perficient, the Epilepsy Foundation team redesigned the UI and module architecture to create a new, efficient website on Drupal. They built reusable code components, optimized the database and performed security upgrades to close loopholes. To improve the user experience, Perficient’s creative team designed a new theme, implemented forums and a Drupal chat system, and deployed Acquia Personalization to help with delivering personalized content based on user behavior. 

The Results

The revamped Epilepsy Foundation site serves personalized content for new and registered users and has reduced time-to-market from two months to one week. Additionally:

• Organic traffic increased by 31%
• New users increased by 24%
• Page views increased by 21%
• Average time on site and clickthrough rates saw an overall increase, leading to an increase in user conversions
• Touch count increased by 1X after Acquia Personalization integration
• Application performance was improved by 190%
• Page load speed went from 12 seconds to less than 3 seconds
• Application maintenance costs decreased by 36% 
• Developer dependency decreased by half using the panelizer module
• Application uptime increased to 99.999%
• Support tickets have been reduced by 40%