The National Safety Council (NSC) was stuck.  Its magazine website, Safety+Health proved difficult to update and modify using their Sharepoint system.  They wanted to enhance member benefits to NSC association members and generate more revenue, but to start with, they needed a publishing system that simplified editorial workflow and gave them control to modify website pages.

The NSC is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to save lives by preventing injuries and deaths at work, in homes, communities and on the road through leadership, research, education and advocacy. Their publication, Safety+Health magazine, offers comprehensive national coverage of occupational safety news and analysis of industry trends to 86,000 subscribers.

To provide greater value to those subscribers, NSC chose to relaunch Safety+Health and selected a platform to support all of their priority editorial requirements and, most importantly, give them control to insert offers and create new pages for the web, tablets and mobile devices.

Editorial Control: No More Waiting

The new Safety + Health eliminates the wait: by leveraging intuitive, user-friendly tools editors make their own changes – requiring no programming skills or IT support.

The site’s pages (including the homepage) are peppered with editorial content zones that provide editors with free form spaces where they place promotions, events and offers that include images, links and text.  Admin tools give NSC staff the flexibility to use an area or not, as needed, to preserve the visual flow of the page.

Safety + Health takes advantage of this feature in numerous ways, but perhaps one of their most stellar examples is the issue archive. 

NSC also created additional efficiencies by automating many processes, such as their newsletter workflow, and by leveraging the Audience Management System to gather subscription and contact information data with most-read and most-emailed content data to inform their content marketing strategies and enhance NSC member benefits.

Enhancing Member Benefits

The site’s mega-menu navigation is another example of enhanced control that greatly enhances member value while increasing site performance.  By making resources more engaging and easier to find, readers are more likely to explore to topics, watch videos or view product and company listings.

The mega-menu features drop-down menus that supplement topics and categories with images, hot topics and related resources for News, Products, Resources & Tools and a Buyers Guide.

Similarly, Site Search presents Articles along with several more resources – Webinars, Directories, Pages and Blogs – to increase time on site and lead generation.

Often overlooked, the What’s Your Opinion Poll creates important audience engagement with quick-hitting questions and instant results.  Safety & Health staff have the option of using a third-party system or built-in tools—without a lapse in functionality.

Greater Value + New Revenue

By implementing the ePublishing Enterprise Publishing System to support its revitalized website, NSC made a seamless transition, retaining all the services its members had come to expect, while preparing to create new revenue streams in the future:

• Mobile Delivery:  Mobile- and tablet-friendly design make the site accessible anywhere.
• Weekly newsfeed NSC.org: an RSS feed automatically delivers selected top news items to the association site.
• Weekly eNewsletter: An integration with Constant Contact automates eNewsletters workflow. Editors tag articles, blog posts, ads and events by category and date.  No cutting, pasting or logging into a separate system!
• Landing pages
• Reporting includes content to supplement Google Analytics reporting:

·       Articles:  Most Popular, Most eMailed, Most Viewed

·       Directory Listings: View History, Lead History

·       Search: Most Popular Search Terms, and more.

• Comments
• Social Media Feeds, Sharing
• Multiple category groups:

·      Topic links and related content can be presented on an article page

·      Related content, topic pages and products are presented in Search results.

• Forms: registration, events, subscription 
• Categories – semantic content association: Using a built-in taxonomy system content is associated by industry, company, product and topic.

Looking Forward

Upcoming Buyers Guide: When Safety + Health releases the new buyers guide on August 1, it will present tiered (free, basic and premium) listings organized by industry. Customers and editorial staff maintain listings and the tier will determine the number of categories associated with a listing.  Listings options include:

• Product Descriptions
• Video
• Whitepapers, Brochures
• Press releases, Articles
• Events
• Listings can be associated with Articles and other content via semantic tagging, to present company, product and service information in search results and on article pages. 

NSC future-proofed its digital strategy by adding the ability to generate leads for sponsors and sell intelligently to its B-to-B audience. Watch to see how they take advantage of additional features to track and target audience behavior, site use and other data points:

• The Articles market: RSS subscription feeds, including images, to deliver to corporate intranets.
• Specialty newsletters
• eCommerce
• Audience Management
• Ongoing Control: NSC staff create JavaScript, editorial content areas and CSS files to modify site appearance, layout and functionality. Built-in tools allow editors or site administrators to create pages, modify navigation and create links without additional programming.

The Result?

With the new Safety+Health, NSC upgraded its member services and value for members and sponsors.  Control, including the ability to present webinars and listings in context with articles, and the ability to easily modify content presentation is making all the difference to NSC staff. 

We’re looking forward to seeing how new eCommerce and Audience Management tools drive strategy and revenue in the near future!