Whether you’re in need of a user research pro, or a communications strategy that will make you stand out, our ESI team is here to bring enthusiasm and expertise to your digital solutions. With a proven track record of crafting strategies and materials for a diverse range of federal clients, we will ensure your approaches will not only engage your audiences but also be accessible, plainly written, and compliant with the recent Integrated Digital Experience Act requirements. ESI offers the following services:
ESI is proud to have several digital services professionals working with the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT). ESI employees are an integral part of the CBIIT communications team, bringing their expertise in technical and scientific writing, UX and user research, and communications strategy to their roles. We currently maintain CBIIT’s premier communications channels and consult on specific communication strategies for various CBIIT teams.
In 2017, former NCI director, Dr. Ned Sharpless, made big data a priority during his tenure. To support this, our client, CBIIT, established NCI’s Data Science hub, where data scientists and cancer researchers alike could find big data science information from across the Institute. However, they knew they needed to optimize their existing website strategy to both meet the needs, and be findable, to the growing cancer data science community.
To become the hub of data science information, CBIIT needed to establish a level of content authority, linking to a variety of existing NCI information and developing new content to fill the gaps. The first step was to learn from CBIIT’s audience. ESI supported CBIIT in updating its personas to better understand the content needs for its audiences. Knowing that continuous feedback would help their content thrive, we implemented digital analytics, like/dislike buttons, pop-up surveys, and regular user touchpoints. Through these insights, we helped to strategize a regular content editorial. Our approach was to make the content plainly written, findable via common cancer data science phrases, promoted regularly through the channels CBIIT audiences frequented, and actionable to encourage visitors to click through to NCI’s data science projects and resources.
In the four years since ESI implemented this strategy, the Data Science hub website grew from 42,000 users per year to 119,000 users per year, and those numbers have continued to increase as ESI employees refine and expand CBIIT’s web content calendar.