The American Society of Consultant Pharmacists (ASCP) is an international professional association that provides resources, education, advocacy and leadership to advance the practice of consultant and senior care pharmacy. Its members manage and improve drug therapy and the quality of life for patients in sub acute care, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, hospice programs, home-care and community-based care. ASCP has a wide number of stakeholders including patients, consumers, healthcare professionals, doctors, nurses, product managers, pharmaceutical advertisers, industry lobbyists, academia, researchers, policy makers, press, consumers and media.

ASCP was seeking a website redesign to help accomplish their organization goals. The existing site was difficult to maintain and was the by-product of different employees over the years that have long since turned-over and left the company. ASCP needed a way to manage their copious amount of content of over 3000 HTML pages and approximately 300-400 PDF documents on their in-house MacOS and Linux system. ASCP wanted to make their website more community-oriented, to retain current memberships and to increase new members. They also wanted to reduce the weekly call-volume of inquiries for request for information that was already on their website, but was difficult for their stakeholders to find.

Fig Leaf Software’s creative team of award-winning graphics artists, seasoned writers, experienced programmers and expert information architects worked collaboratively with ASCP throughout the project. Fig Leaf created a site-map to enhance the navigation and to address the issue of the weekly call volume. The solution involved Fig Leaf creating two types of navigation; one based on informational topics and another that is an action-oriented, menu-driven navigation. Fig Leaf helped to implement a WSYIWIG content management system, CommonSpot, to enable ASCP’s staff to easily manage and update their website content without having to code in HTML. Fig Leaf developed the CSS for ease-of-maintenance, the layout for improved navigation and the HTML design to reinforce ASCP’s brand. 

As a result of the project, ASCP received a 2006 Standard of Excellence Award from the Web Marketing Association. Fig Leaf Software helped ASCP achieve its goals by creating a user-friendly website with intuitive navigation and consistent branding. ASCP now has a standard tool that even their non-technical staff can use for website content creation, management and publishing for multiple authors. Fig Leaf helped ASCP integrate their new site with their back-end databases and process that optimizes ASCP’s vast content repository. ASCP is now empowered to easily manage, move and maintain content over the web much faster and more accurately than before. The website now has improved usability, greater operational efficiencies, an enhanced aesthetic design that boosts the association’s image and an overall improved user experience. As a result of the website redesign, ASCP membership has increased by nearly 8% to 7,000 members. ASCP is very pleased with the project results.

“We are extremely proud of our new, award winning Web site. Fig Leaf Software designed a very clean, functional site that conveys who we are – America’s Senior Care Pharmacists.  The new site is much easier to navigate, with intuitive menu bars and an easy to read page format.  Soon members will be able to join and update their membership record online.

With such a large site, it was critical that we find a content management solution that would work across the whole organization so that we would no longer be reliant on a single individual to maintain the entire site. Fig Leaf Software recommended CommonSpot as the viable solution. 

Although ASCP’s Web Team members learned to use the CommonSpot software, it was the hands-on guidance from Fig Leaf Software on how to organize and construct Web pages that made a significant difference in achieving our Web site goals.  After all, most ASCP Team members had no background at all in developing or delivering content through the Web.  The Fig Leaf Software team honed in our needs and delivered an extraordinary Web site for ASCP.  We couldn’t have done it without them.”

~ Phylliss Moret, Associate Executive Director and COO, ASCP