Sports, Cardiovascular, and Wellness Nutrition
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals. DevBridge built a media rich and interactive portal for Sports, Cardiovascular, and Wellness Nutrition - a dietetic practice group of the AND comprised of over 6,000 members.
SCAN (Sports, Cardiovascular, and Wellness Nutrition) needed a central location where the group could communicate with its members, offer value to members in the form of centralized resources, and share the knowledge and expertise of their registered dietitians with the public audience.
We advised SCAN that the ideal approach would be to create an environment where registered dietitians would gain exposure and leads based on their own participation within the website. High credibility resources for nutritional information are relatively rare on the web, so connecting the dietitians with consumers, in our mind, was the best way to drive traffic to the site, create value both for visitors and for members of the organization.
Our Approach
DevBridge felt right at home with the project because we clearly saw the means of delivering value to all parties that might be visiting the website. We decided to expand member profiles, hook up the profiles to social media sites, and allow visitors to find registered dietitians in their region. At the same time, we added a BisonCart based online store for regular products, event registrations, and digital delivery media (video, audio, and downloadable content) and made it accessible and simple to use. We also implemented discussion boards, a blog, event calendars, member marketplace, member-only access areas, and many other features that act as tools the registered dietitians can use to engage potential clients.
Engaging the Members
The profile of the member appears in multiple places on the website. We expanded the information that a member can store on the profile, linked up the profile with social media sites, and hooked up the address of the dietitian to Google maps. Every time a profile is saved, we query Google and establish the coordinates of that member that can later be used in the “Find a Registered Dietitian” section of the website.
We also wanted members to interact with visitors of the site, so we added functionality that allows visitors to ask members questions. The question shows up on their profile page and the member gets points every time they answer a question. While this might seem simplistic, the questions and responses we have seen show in depth discussions which add value for visitors, and also establish credibility of the registered dietitians. Additionally, active members are recommended on the “Find a Registered Dietitian” page as the top participants.
Find a Registered Dietitian
A core component that SCAN emphasized was the ability to find a registered dietitian by supplying the mile radius and a zip code. We tapped into Google maps to retrieve the positions of all dietitians in the system and added a page which allows viewing dietitians by state, searching by postal code, and searching by advanced filters.
Delivering Media
During annual SCAN symposiums the presentation sessions are recorded so that they could be later made available to attendees and members who have not had a chance to participate. We configured our e-commerce component to allow content purchases that include video, audio, and document downloads. All sessions from the symposium have been setup in the store and made globally available; purchased media is automatically available to a user in their “My Media” section of the website. This means that members do not have to download and worry about storing large media files – they can simply stream the video or download the Mp3 and play it on their iPods.
More Control for the Executive Committee
An organization such as SCAN is run by elected volunteers and coordination of effort is very important. We created a centralized document repository on the website which allows the executive committee to upload and archive documents in various categories. We also created an executive calendar which allows the committee to establish important dates and communicate them between the members of the team.
As usual, all components of the site are administered through a custom administration panel.
Ready, Set, Launch
It deserves to be mentioned that the launch of SCAN had to be delicately handled. With over 5,500 users, the launch had to be coordinated, explained, and ushered through so that all members would successfully be able to gain access.
We created an email template that we sent out through MailChimp instructing users how to come to the site and reset their passwords. An instructional page was created which allowed members to reset their accounts based on their membership id or their email address. Considering the quantity of users the transition was very smooth and caused minimal disturbance.
Social and Private at the Same Time
The benefit of becoming a member of SCAN is gaining access to their vast library of content that deals with sports nutrition, cardiovascular health, and eating disorders. We wanted to structure this content so it would be easily accessible, yet secure from unauthorized visitors. We expanded our Content Management System to handle private pages that are for member eyes only and integrated several levels of permissions for the administrative staff that handles content editing.
DevBridge added discussion boards to the website which allow members to communicate in privacy and in public: separate groups were created for topical discussion, public discussion, and discussions related to events and travel arrangements for events.
We also integrated a blog, linked the website to SCAN’s Facebook page, and hooked up a Google news feed into the site which allows the administration at SCAN to import relevant news stories to their news page. A member marketplace section allows members to list their own services and products, on which regular consumers can then vote!