Case Study: A Mobile and Social Focus

Today, more than 60 percent of Web traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, it is more important than ever for nonprofits to ensure visitors can easily and conveniently navigate their websites—no matter whether visitors are browsing via smartphone, tablet or desktop computer.

Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) is a national nonprofit that improves the lives of people affected by ADHD through education, advocacy and support. With more than 7,000 members, CHADD is at the forefront of creating and implementing programs and services to support the ADHD community. With the mission to serve as an educational resource and provide support for those affected by ADHD, CHADD knew that its website was key in reaching not only its members, but also the general public. However, CHADD’s website was not optimized for mobile-browsing. Thus, the organization wanted to ensure that visitors could easily and conveniently navigate its site from across the device landscape.

Along with making its website mobile-friendly, CHADD wanted to replace its existing social community with a more flexible platform that would seamlessly integrate with its website to provide additional benefits to members and non-members alike. At the time, CHADD’s social community was open to members only and fell short when it came to enticing visitors to use it. Also, the community was hosted on a different domain, so CHADD risked losing visitors from its main site, which could negatively affect its search-engine rankings.

“We knew that if we were going to redo our social community, we really needed to catch people’s eyes with something that’s different,” said Arlene Pisano, CHADD’s webmaster. “We wanted to liven up our site, make it responsive and develop our communities all at one time.”

CHADD's responsive site on a mobile device

The Solution: Taking the Responsive Route
CHADD enlisted the help of St. Louis-based Engage, a full-service firm that designs and develops web and mobile solutions for enterprises. Engage extended its current DNN theme to be flexible and responsive, while maintaining a design consistent with CHADD’s branding.

Then, Engage implemented a new social platform, DNN’s Evoq Engage. Integrated with CHADD’s website, the Evoq-powered social community would keep visitors on the website and create a consistent brand experience that the previous, externally hosted community could not provide. Also, using Evoq’s easily configurable user roles and permissions, Engage helped CHADD make many educational resources available to all site visitors while still giving members access to exclusive features, like discussion groups and private chat areas.

Revealing the Results
Since launching its responsive website, CHADD has experienced a significant uptick in mobile traffic, meaning that it is reaching and engaging additional visitors. In a year-on-year comparison, CHADD’s mobile traffic increased by 32 percent, with a 42 percent growth in new mobile users. CHADD’s tablet traffic also grew by 13 percent, while the bounce rate for both mobile and tablet users dropped.

With its new online social community, CHADD is supporting its strategy of expanding its reach to the general public. The public-facing side of the community gets activity on a daily basis, and many users are answering one another’s questions directly within the discussion boards. Therefore, users do not have to solicit help from CHADD’s already busy volunteers.

“Engage’s team provided the expertise to help make our site responsive, fully integrate our social community, and get everything up and running,” Pisano concluded. “We have been pleased to see such a dramatic increase in mobile users—and even the number of new mobile users. Moving forward, we are hoping to see even more involvement with our social community, especially during the school year.”