When Community Is the Product: American Cancer Society

For the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society (ACS), fostering a sense of community among cancer patients, survivors, their families, and ACS’s donors and volunteers is an implicit part of the nonprofit organization’s mission. For ACS, community is about more than Web-based tools; it’s about helping people cope and survive.

What’s special about ACS’s website, Cancer.org, is how its design leads users to community. When the ACS undertook the redesign of its website last summer (see "Healing Channels," Page 96), it analyzed what community meant to the organization and its constituents. It also explored how the idea of community should manifest itself on the site, and it mapped how visitors move through the site to find applications that connect them to others.

Before the redesign, message boards and other interactive community forums were located in just one area, on a separate subsite of Cancer.org. James Miller, ACS’s director of Internet strategy, says that community was such an important aspect of Cancer.org that ACS wanted to weave community features throughout the site. No matter where someone affected by cancer was on Cancer.org, she could easily find her way to a chat room or message board.

To determine how the site should be redesigned to suit users’ needs, ACS worked with Cambridge, Mass.-based systems integrator Sapient. Members of the two organizations virtually lived with cancer patients for a week to learn about their lives, the information they needed and the support they sought. Based on that experience, they drew up scenarios illustrating why a person visits Cancer.org and how they move through the site. For example, they determined that Joe?a hypothetical individual recently diagnosed with prostate cancer?would first come to Cancer.org looking for basic information about the disease and treatment, so ACS put those links on the homepage. He might then be interested in finding out about support groups near where he lives, so ACS put a search function on the homepage where Joe could enter his ZIP code and find out about events in his community. Joe can also find out about support services when he links to general information on prostate cancer. Eventually, Joe will want to know what questions he should ask his doctor, or what he should be monitoring during his treatment. ACS decided that it was best for him to get this advice from fellow patients and survivors, so it put links to chat rooms and bulletin boards both on its homepage and on pages with information on the disease.