Overview
The National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) first launched the Data Science Hub to empower cancer researchers with data science resources. To keep building upon the hub’s momentum, ESI digital strategists developed a content strategy and site roadmap that would increase site usage by 183% in its first five years.
The Challenge
As part of the former NCI Director Dr. Ned Sharpless’s focus on big data, our client, NCI CBIIT, established the NCI Data Science Hub. This comprehensive website centralizes data science resources for cancer researchers.
With a solid foundation in place, CBIIT sought to elevate the digital experience to ensure that the content was intuitive, engaging, and easily discoverable to better serve the growing cancer data science community.
The Solution
We began by deepening our understanding of CBIIT’s audience. By refining user personas and gathering input through user comments, surveys, and engagement metrics, we gained insights into their evolving content needs. Leveraging this data, we worked with CBIIT to develop a content strategy that was data-informed and audience-centered.
The editorial approach prioritized plain language, high relevance keywords, and discoverability to ensure the content aligned with common cancer data science terminology. We also built in regular promotions through different media channels to reach and engage the intended audiences. One of the critical promotional tactics was the weekly email newsletter, NCI Data Science Updates, which highlights new timely content posted on the site each week.
Our goal was to make each piece of content not only informative, but also actionable, to guide users towards NCI data science projects, tools, and resources.
The Results
Since launching the new strategy, the hub has seen an 183% increase in monthly traffic over four years, and is consistently ranked within the top 10% of the most visited NCI sites. This is in part due to the success of the weekly email newsletter which reaches more than 32,000 subscribers. Furthermore, visitors to the site rate their experience highly. The average customer satisfaction rating for the hub is 16% higher than the industry average, with most visitors reporting that they would recommend the site to their networks.
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