“These workshops really just help to provide you and your team with time to think through some of these more complex problems … because it’s time boxed and goal oriented, it actually allows you to move faster than you would normally think. Thanks for that [Adage], we continue to use that strategy to this day.”
Reggie Smith, Director, Digital Products
Content Strategy to Support Commerce and the Customer
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) is a global, nonprofit association of health information professionals. For 91 years, AHIMA has been a leader across healthcare in providing education and professional development resources, and in advocating with and on behalf of health information professionals.

The Challenge
As technology advances, a true transformation was required in the way AHIMA views and manages health throughout a patient’s life. With a strategic vision set through 2023, AHIMA turned to Adage to help gain traction on their long-term goals, including advancing the way accurate, quality information is created, stored, protected, accessed, and used to improve care at all touchpoints across the health continuum and in all settings and methods of delivery.
AHIMA needed a common process to unify not just a workflow with one team, but across many teams and sites. It needed to be adaptive enough for the needs of each different team, but prescriptive enough to effectively drive toward overarching goals. They needed a comprehensive content strategy. AHIMA’s number one goal was to narrow down the content they were producing. They wanted to offer a clear, clean path for their users through the certification process – something that ultimately drives users to products.
Transform User Behaviors Using Content Strategy
Content Strategy was the top priority of AHIMA and an overarching goal that all other goals were driven from. Content Strategy allows organizations;
- to help users connect to content,
- tell a consistent brand story across all channels,
- offer a robust search experience,
- create an accessible experience all users,
- leverage content to build user profiles and
- understand the costs and ROI of creating content.
To address it fully for AHIMA, Adage had to think about content from the perspective of a brand new user’s point of view – someone who was new to health information management.
Prior to this redesign, the content on AHIMA’s site was really informative, but didn’t create pathways into the site for someone who was searching from Google and didn’t know where they were going. Adage employed a natural language exploration to determine how are people searching for this information and what will draw people to AHIMA rather than a competitor. With this data, Adage created connections between products AHIMA offers and the content they have, increasing opportunity for conversion by delivering the right content to a visitor.

Content Strategy Guide
The number one tool in an organization’s conversion toolkit is their content and a content-centered approach drives conversion rate optimization. Find out how to get started with Content Strategy in our latest Guide.
Create Searchable and Findable Content
Findability of content is one of the most common challenges facing content-heavy organizations like associations, and when there’s a problem with search, it’s typically a content problem. If a user can’t find the content, it’s not usable. AHIMA was using several different taxonomies across four different sites, which meant that nothing from their body of knowledge could connect to their products. Adage first created a pathway to unify that taxonomy to create those connections. Then Adage focused on structuring metadata so that humans and machines could read the content. “We focused primarily on a few schema.org structures, which is what Google uses to create their rich snippets,” says Lead UX Designer Molly Lee, “by focusing on those not only were we able to create a more rich SEO experience but we were also able to utilize them for more facets and filters within the on-site search.”
Streamline Products and Certifications
“With nearly 400 product offerings in the store today, understanding how and what to study to prepare, take and maintain a certification can be a confusing task,” says Lee, “Moving forward, we want to eliminate redundancies and closely couple educational materials with the related certifications.” Looking ahead to where AHIMA wants to be, Adage used this project to lay the foundation for upcoming efforts around creating a more robust recommendation engine. As machine learning increases the site will be able to wield user personas, content types and content topics that a user has shown interest in and then serve them up something on their specific career path. Organizations looking to utilize new technologies must always remember: you’ve got to walk before you can run. Machine learning recommendations and personalization won’t work without a foundation for clear browsing and search. Organizations can’t skip steps with content and expect success. AHIMA was committed to setting the organization up for future success.
Personalize Content for Users
Creating user personas is essential to understanding a site’s users and their pathway, but what happens when someone progresses out of a persona? Adage decided to look at AHIMA’s user personas not as monoliths – breaking away from large categories like “mid-careerist” or “coding focus” – opting instead for “persistent profiles” that allow the use of more facets based on a user’s career trajectory so the personas are adaptable and not lifelong tags. As their career shifts, the system remembers them, but meets them where they currently are and offers content that will bolster their current professional development needs. By attaching smaller snippets of personas, AHIMA was able to build more realistic personas.
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