Greater Public

Here’s how Mightybytes helped public media’s largest membership association solve significant messaging, content strategy, and user experience problems that were adversely impacting the organization’s bottom line and undermining their brand value.

Greater Public promotes innovative strategies for public media development. With 253 member stations in public radio and television, the organization produces the largest annual conference in public media and provides practical, hands-on support to help its members thrive.

Greater Public was using an outdated and improperly configured content management system, which, for a site with over 7,000 pages, resulted in repeated frustration for site admins and content managers, as well as countless DIY workarounds. Users complained that they couldn’t find relevant content when navigating the site or using its search tool and that the website was often confusing or unclear. Since Greater Public offers premium content behind a paywall, these problems had a direct impact on the organization’s bottom line. The organization asked Mightybytes to help them fix these issues.

Discovery and Content Strategy Workshops

We ran several workshops with the Greater Public team over the course of the project. In early discovery and content strategy workshops, we created proto-personas and mapped user needs to organizational goals, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that help the organization measure success.

During these workshops, we also identified a core messaging strategy to help Greater Public improve member engagement through content. These sessions set the tone for our collaborative working relationship and helped everyone come to consensus on what success looked like.

A Comprehensive Content Audit

Because the site had so much content, much of which was outdated or confusing to users, it required a significant audit. Using messaging and content strategy insights culled from our discovery and strategy workshops, we set ourselves to the task of running a full content audit. During this process, we identified many places where content could either be removed, improved, or combined with other entries to increase clarity and quality and make navigation easier. By culling and combining content based on content audit insights, we were able to reduce up to 90% of the site’s content that wasn’t performing optimally.

During this process, we also facilitated a workshop to help Greater Public better understand content production workflows and identify organizational gaps in content management.

Designing Custom Search Features

Greater Public has a comprehensive resource library that it offers to members. This premium content focuses on topics critical to keeping its member stations successful and solvent. Yet members found the library difficult to search and complained about the relevance of search results. The custom search feature we built lets users filter results in a more targeted way. They can filter resources according to a specific discipline, by all resources, or by all non-resource results. This feature allows users to more quickly find content that is relevant to their needs.

We also built in functionality that allows site admins the ability to group resources into bundles of related content to create helpful toolkits around popular topics, like fundraising or audience engagement, for their members.

User Testing

During the project, we ran several comprehensive user tests. These sessions with real users who were representatives of member stations provided qualitative data that helped all parties achieve better clarity on which feature sets resonated with their audience and which could be improved or put on hold.

We implemented a series of click tests as well, where we asked users to complete several key tasks and recorded their clicks to validate the clarity of navigation and page layouts. The insights from these tests allowed us to vastly improve many site features and ensured that what we launched would resonate with users.

We also integrated the site with Hubspot to improve user engagement, insights from which will inform new site features and navigation improvements.

Training and Documentation

Finally, we built training documentation right into the CMS admin interface. These tooltips help Greater Public content managers and site admins more quickly execute common content management tasks. They also make it easier for new team members to get up to speed quickly.

Content Management Made Easy

With its new site, Greater Public now has a CMS customized to their specific needs that they can use to administer and manage content for casual users and registered members alike. Comprehensive yet easy-to-understand content management tools save time for site admins while also helping users, including registered members, more quickly find the content they need, which directly affects the organization’s bottom line.