Vestibular Disorders Association

Key Facts

• The Vestibular Disorders Association (VeDA) is a national nonprofit that informs, supports and advocates for the vestibular community (those with inner ear, dizziness, or balance disorders).

• Their website receives millions of visitors every year and includes information for patients, memberships for healthcare providers, online forums, support groups, and more.

• They operate with a small staff of 5, with much of their work done via the website.

Outcomes

Here are a few ways we helped VeDA:

1. Enabled staff to work more efficiently

When we first talked with VeDA, they were struggling to manage the complexity of their website, which was slowing their staff down and preventing them from serving patients and professionals effectively.

We tackled this issue by:

• Improving the infrastructure of VeDA’s Drupal website to make it more efficient and resilient to updates and changes.

• Helping VeDA adopt a bi-weekly update cycle to begin making changes to the website.

• Discussing, prioritizing, and fixing the major website problems impacting staff productivity using these update cycles.

This removed many pain points and roadblocks so their small staff could use the website more efficiently to do their day-to-day work. It also resulted in a website that was less prone to emergency downtimes.

2. Mitigated an EOY fundraising emergency

As the end of the year approached, VEDA discovered they had been placed on an email blacklist. Around 30% of their emails (including 1:1 communication between the Executive Director and major donors) were not being delivered. Unaddressed, the issue could lead to hundreds of thousands of lost fundraising dollars.

We mobilized to help VeDA by:

• Identifying the underlying issues that caused the email blacklist.

• Creating a temporary email system to ensure their EOY fundraising campaign could be delivered.

• Working with them to implement email deliverability best practices.

This resulted in them being removed from the blacklist a few months later, and allowed them to send their EOY fundraising campaign.

3. Optimized their website for mobile and Google AdGrants

VeDA’s website was desktop-only when they came to us, even though data showed a majority of their traffic was from mobile. They also wanted to use Google AdGrants to grow their subscriber list.

We helped by:

• Converting their site to be mobile responsive (without rebuilding the website or adding a separate mobile-friendly site).

• Implementing landing page templates to help them capture the email address of visitors from Google ads.

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