Case Study: The American Society for Reproductive Medicine

Case Study: The American Society for Reproductive Medicine www.asrm.org

Overview

In the last five years, The Berndt Group has become a major developer of sites for associations and advocacy groups. A recent project that pulls together many of the themes of this work is the web site for www.asrm.org that we recently launched—the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM).

Located in Birmingham Alabama, ASRM is the primary organization dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of reproductive medicine, as well as being a professional association for doctors with that specialty. The Berndt Group's project involved a complete, soup-to-nuts redesign of the web site and its five affiliate sites, including strategy, user experience, content management system (CMS) consulting, implementation, integration with an association management system (AMS), training, and hosting of the final site.

The Process

The Berndt Group developed the ASRM sites through its usual structured design process, which involves putting a large number of contingent strategy, planning and execution steps in the right order. We selected Ektron CMS 400 for this project, given the product's extremely high value for mid-sized organizations and its wide feature set, including tools for extranet and social networking functions. Our structured design process for the project included a major focus on getting the most value from the product, within the context of a clearly developed web strategy.

An equally important focus of this project was to find strategic solutions in a number of areas common to associations, but of particular importance to ASRM.

First, ASRM needed to flesh out a strategy for better member services online, including member-self-service and collaboration process—all very crucially turning on good integration between the organization's association management system and the content management system/site.
Second, the organization needed to maintain the mind-share equity of its top publications, which are as equally well known as the organization, so strategy needed to take into account pushing those publications.
The project also included multiple rogue web sites that needed to be, to varying extents, folded into the main web site with a consistent approach.
Last but not least, ASRM does a great deal of web publishing with a small staff, so best practices for CMS implementation were important, focusing on how to enable the best content strategy and user experience through automation and a clearly thought-out CMS architecture.

Results

To date, the new site for ASRM is a big success, and has hit the right notes to accomplish the goals mentioned above.

The CMS and AMS work well together, enabling not only a very active publishing and member management operation with high efficiencies, but also excellent member self-service.
The site also actively promotes publications, has great topical content, and strong inter-relationships among content in the site, created automatically.
The user experience of the site takes into account a more dynamic, social approach to web design known as "Web 2.0" and makes full use of the Ektron software for single-sign on, collaboration, and interaction among members.

So far, the site is extremely popular, and a major step forward for ASRM's web strategy. This project is indicative of the kind of holistic improvements The Berndt Group regularly brings to association sites.

It was a challenge to create a more interactive web site for our members, as well as organize the vast amount of patient-focused information on our site. The Berndt Group worked with us to redesign our existing site and create a complementary site focused on the reproductive health needs of patients and the public. Both sites are customer-service oriented, appealing and easy to navigate.

Dr. Robert Rebar,
ASRM Executive Director

Case Study: The American Society for Reproductive Medicine www.asrm.org

Overview

The Process

Results

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