American Medical Association - “Topics” Pages

Since the publication of their Drupal 7 site in late 2016, the AMA identified that while expansion of their web initiatives had created a wealth of new content for their audiences, that content was also becoming more and more disparate across their properties (Drupal and otherwise). From Michelle Scannicchio, Director of Digital Analytics, “The purpose of the Topic Hub page is to drive membership purchase and retention over time by being a trusted resource on the topics that matter to members and prospects.” Those topics could be driven by any number of factors—medical students’ interests might be more focused around the academic year, yet doctors might be more influenced by news and current events. Underlying all of these issues, the AMA’s goal was to inform current members how they’re being supported in these topic areas, and to educate prospective members about the benefits of membership.

Much of the content in the initial version of the Topics project was to be meta-content — that is, a basic title, description, link, and optional image which would be combined into a link out to the source, whether that be on another Drupal property or external site. Displaying that meta-content with different display modes allowed content editors the flexibility to reuse content across many portions of their page. Custom blocks containing entity references were placed into custom layouts with the Panels In-Place-Editor, meaning that editors could have a true, block-level, WYSIWYG experience in creating each topic experience. Later phases of the project integrated automated feeds of meta-content from Drupal and non-Drupal properties via XML feeds, allowing editors to grab new posts even easier.

The first topic pages launched in late October 2017, and by the end of 2017, the AMA content team had published 6 topic pages. These pages were met with rave reviews from the internal stakeholders.

AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger described the pages as “The best pages AMA has ever put on the web, and they’re even better on mobile.”

Members of the board and others expressed their satisfaction with the new topic-driven experience, and the content team was able to show the pages at their all-company town-hall, garnering interest from across the organization for creating hubs for many other topics.

Analytics numbers echoed the feedback. Visitors to these pages:

• spend 2x more time on AMA properties;
• view 2.8x more pages;
• are 20% more likely to begin the membership application process;
• interact more with AMA content, with a 2x smaller bounce rate.