Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

The Client

The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is the world’s leader in the search for a cure for cystic fibrosis, a rare, genetic disease that progressively limits the ability to breathe, causing debilitating lung infections, and ultimately, premature death.

The Situation

For its updated site, the Foundation had numerous goals:

• Streamline and improve the content creation process without IT support by employing flexible page layouts, effective workflows, centralized content, and automation.
• Provide personalized user experiences and dynamic delivery of site content by leveraging data, tagging, and content across platforms.
• Gather a holistic view of engagement by measuring the user journey across channels and over time.
• Provide users with an effortless search process across aggregated, detailed resources, clinical research trials, blogs, and events so they could quickly access relevant information and feel like the Foundation understands and supports their unique situation
• Share and promote accessible content in the target audiences’ primary language at their level of understanding – from kids’ games to in-depth clinical research outcomes.
• Help users learn about and take advantage of opportunities to get involved in the CF community and support the Foundation, nationally and locally.

The Challenge

The Foundation had specific challenges it needed to overcome to meet its organizational goals and ensure its digital presence fully supported its mission:

• Unify client data 
• Migrate from .NET (Ektron) to Drupal
• Appease IT department’s concerns with “the unknown”
• Meet testing and iteration needs
• Perform A/B tests
• Support rapid cycles
• Enable creation of Foundation chapter sites

The Solution

The Foundation partnered with digital product agency Phase2, which started the project focusing on serving key audiences and improving the Foundation’s content creation flexibility and efficiency. Phase2 partnered with a core team of stakeholders and dozens of subject matter experts from many different departments within the Foundation. 

The transformation strategy was backed by a new design and design system. Working together, the teams created a new UX and information architecture, designed a content strategy that supported migration to the new, flexible Drupal platform, and implemented a meaningful digital measurement model to help the Foundation measure the impact and value of its new site. 

The new site design and UX focus on providing clear paths for a variety of audiences to the content they need, such as critical information for the newly diagnosed, a community voice for people living with CF, and ways to get involved for those who support individuals living with CF. 

The Results

By choosing to host their new Drupal site with Acquia Cloud Platform, the Foundation saved weeks of set-up time for development, staging, and production environments. Acquia provided modern deployment pipelines for continuous integration and testing, and scalable hosting to handle whatever the Foundation needed. Additionally, the Foundation no longer needs to worry about performance and uptime. The new site is secure and stable, using FedRAMP-approved security and infrastructure.

The new site has delivered impressive results:

• The web team can easily and independently maintain and update the site without IT assistance. One specific section – a data visualization for research funding – now takes hours to update, whereas previously, it required weeks of coding.  
• Dashboards provide views into user engagement across multiple metrics, allowing the team to track goal progress and adjust in real time. 
• The flexible layout allows staff to stay on brand without the whole site looking the same.
• The codebase was extended to migrate the conference site, nacfconference.org.
• Improved navigation helps end users find what they need quickly, serving the Foundation's multiple audiences.
• Audience-specific resources help end users find vital information like care guides, to learn more about managing CF, and information for people newly diagnosed with CF. 
• Spanish language speakers now have expanded and more accessible content.
• The new site has been recognized as a finalist for the Webby Awards and won two EXCEL Awards for design and general website excellence.