To effectively translate this online knowledge and revise existing content on Dr. Siden’s past projects, I relied heavily on the patient-oriented research articles and the webinar discussions from the summer studentship program. Above all, I made sure to keep in mind the importance of creating a website which is orientated towards patients and their families and is easily understood by non-academics. I primarily achieved this by implementing a user-friendly design and by testing our content on our Family Advisory Committee (upcoming).
For the bulk of my project, I re-designed and drafted new content for PedPalASCNET's website using WordPress. To begin, I reviewed existing content from other lab websites, and drafted content based on trends I found. I then planned interviews to gather families’ stories on their experiences participating in our research, and to test the early designs and content to make sure that they are usable and understandable. Focus groups have been scheduled to gather similar feedback from families.
In addition, I managed PedPalASCNET’s social media/mailing lists. This work with social media directly informed our ongoing outreach strategy by allowing me to analyze our twitter data, our website usage through Google Analytics, and the analytics on our MailChimp emails. We made an effort to find twitter users who identified as families of sick children and track which tweets were popular. As a result, the research network now has a better sense of what the research and patient communities engage with the most, and we have tailored our web content according to these trends.