Shasta Community Health
When a client's mission is saving lives, it highlights the importance of our work at M7. Shasta Community Health Center (SCHC) is a critical resource providing quality care to Northern California residents, regardless of insurance status. To improve its digital experience and better meet the needs of its diverse audiences, SCHC asked us to reimagine its digital presence from the ground up.
Primary goals of the project were to streamline patient engagement, support clinician recruiting, and implement an intuitive platform that could be easily updated. Importantly, we adopted the mindset of virtually embedding ourselves within the client's organization to facilitate communication and achieve the goals of each SCHC's internal stakeholders.
Project Details
An Embedded Mindset
M7's ability to become a literal extension of a client's organization was a huge value add for this project. Partnering with SCHC's executive, communications, and IT teams, we struck the right balance of taking direction while providing guidance, expertise, and heavy-lifting - just as an adept internal team would. The result was a deep partnership that went beyond the typical client/agency dynamic and was a primary driver of project success.
Refining the Brand
When a client outgrows its brand guidelines, we look for new, exciting opportunities. Although a rebrand wasn't in the budget, we found inspiration in the clinic's physical environment and an annual Impact Report that beautifully expressed SCHC's essence. On our recommendation, foundational aspects of the formal brand were maintained. But we worked hard to integrate an enhanced color palette, graphic elements, and more authentic imagery. The result is a colorful, vibrant website faithful to other key touchpoints in the SCHC experience.
Clinician Recruiting
A major focus of the new SCHC site is to support talent acquisition. Recruiting is competitive for all healthcare providers, but it's even more challenging outside of major urban areas. Working closely with the SHC team, we uncovered their exceptionally strong postgraduate training program and recommended surfacing it as a primary navigation element. Further, we architected a Careers section that intuitively promotes job categories and extols the virtues of living in northernmost California.
Designed to Engage
Early on, our audience research revealed a key opportunity: SCHC's website visitors were struggling to accomplish critical tasks like making appointments, accessing accounts, and finding contact information. Our solution was an intuitive home page 'Action Bar' placing these interactions front and center. Since visitors to healthcare provider websites are often in acute situations, intuitive wayfinding helps reduce anxiety and expedite the journey to care.
A Modular Approach
Empowering SCHC's marcom team to make updates without technical assistance was a foundational requirement. Although Drupal was CMS platform of choice for its flexibility, we were asked to up the ante. We developed a suite of custom templates to provide a layout structure that will maintain consistency in the future. It takes the guesswork out of page-level design so non-designers can now grow the site with a consistent, intuitive design experience.
