Co-presenters: Courtney Reyers and Dina Lewis, CAE Associations create categories and buckets for most everything they do—from membership levels to conference tracks and more. Add in branded products, acronyms, and multiple departments, and the challenge of marketing to members and digital content consumers gets tougher. This interactive session examines how a scientific society used a collaborative approach to break through traditional silos and obtain buy-in from staff, subject matter experts, and members to create a controlled vocabulary that is the keystone for its digital content strategy.

1. Build a Controlled Vocabulary to
Bust Organizational Silos
Courtney Reyers, American Society for Microbiology
Dina Lewis, CAE, Distilled Logic

2. Who We Are
Let Me Guide U 2 the Purple Rain:
Web Redesign = Change Management

3. Who We Are
Courtney Dina
• In-house content strategy, UX and
user advocate
• Music journalist→ print content
manager→ web blower-upper
• International house DJ for 10 years,
rode 100 miles on a bike, just got
engaged :D
• UX and content strategy consultant
• Journalism major→ association jack-
of-all-trades→ entrepreneur
• Played at Little League World Series
Stadium, attended four World Cups/
Euro Cups, harvest my own veggies

4. Why We’re Here

5. What We’re Going to Do
Deep Dive Workshop Agenda
• Intros and overview of session
5 minutes
• Case Study: Overview
10 minutes
• Exercise: Debate controlled vocab & build a pitch 45 minutes
• Case Study: Clincher or How ASM did it 10
minutes
• Q & A: Pick our brains
20 minutes

6. ASM Case Study

7. ASM Case Study

8. ASM Case Study

9. Case Study
Research
• Stakeholder Interviews
• Member and Staff Surveys
Content
Strategy
• Statement
• Philosophy/Culture Change
Content
Strategy
• Personas
• Content Audit
• Taxonomy Review

10. ASM Case Study

11. ASM Case Study
• Marketing Codes
• Scientific Taxonomy
• Tracks
• Journals
• Press
• Divisions
• Scientific Interest
Areas

12. ASM Case Study: Vocabularies

13. Value of a Controlled Vocabulary

14. Workshop: Debate controlled vocabulary and create pitch

15. Workshop Instructions

16. Workshop Results: Share Group Feedback
• What frameworks did you come up with?
• What were some of the considerations (similarities, differences,
cross-departmental mapping) that you discussed?
• Describe the key messages or themes in your pitch.
• What challenges do you see to adopting a controlled vocabulary:
• What benefits?

17. This is Miguel Robe. He is searching for a microbiology
meeting near him. He types “microbiology meeting” into
Google.
Miguel lands at asm.org/microbe.
He sees he can make the date and city and registers.
When he registers, we ask him what some of his interests
are, he checks off “Virology” and “Zika” and elects to
receive content from us on these topics
His interests correlate with content on the
website, as well as interest fields in the
AMS.
We plan a Zika conference in 2018, which Miguel finds out about in a content email from ASM, which
contains an ad based on his interest areas.
!
How interesting...

18. Case Study: How ASM Did It
• We had 2 years of user research and testing under our belts in
terms of how people find content on our website
• We had 5 keyword workshops in house, including scientific input
from our SMEs/science Ph.D.s
• The finalized streamlined “vocabulary” was validated with a card
sort of ASM members
• This vocabulary will be used on the new website and in the AMS

19. Streamlined Vocabulary
• Current Terms are Too Broad and Redundant
Example: “General Microbiology” was used as a
Marketing Code and a Division
• Terms Could be Streamlined in Some Areas
Example: “Microbial Pathogenesis” in Divisions
and “Pathogenesis” in Scientific Areas mean the same
thing
• Terms Can be Mapped Across Systems
Example: Books, journals and education can be mapped to
new controlled vocabulary categories.

21. Questions?
Dina Lewis, CAE
dina@distilledlogic.net
Courtney Reyers
@courtneyreyers
Complete ASAE Foundation content strategy
survey: https://goo.gl/6H1Eix