The Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA) has been promoting research and evidence-based practice in addiction for over 130 years.

Its goal in that time hasn’t changed – to broaden and promote the scientific understanding of addiction. When the SSA wanted to increase their effectiveness in doing exactly that, they approached us.

Central to pro-actively disseminating research and information is the Society’s website – which was in need of an overhaul. Out-of-date underlying architecture, a dated design and a confusing navigation system were making the site difficult for new users to interact with – while maintenance costs were spiralling.

We worked closely with the Society to deliver a new, beautiful site based on WordPress, to keep maintenance costs low and to protect against future software changes in the market. With a huge community supporting its evolution and a massive range of plugins available to help with additional functionality, WordPress was the ideal CMS for the SSA, who didn’t need a complex solution.

We then used this as a platform to work with the new website editor to carry-out a content audit across the site, to help us work towards a new, streamlined navigation system that could be used easily by both power users and novices to find important research, policy and practice guidelines.

We coupled this with a content-led approach to design, to ensure that information was easily digested and the interface worked to enhance presentation and navigation.

After impressing with our strategic approach to the project, the SSA retained us to work alongside them on ongoing content production.

Having examined existing analytics across owned platforms, we identified informal video use as a key tool to aid dissemination, as opposed to previous use which had encompassed long form and presentation-led video content.

We worked closely with the SSA across some of their flagship live events to deliver clips ‘as live’ across social to further the reach of speakers, while compiling short, snappy and interesting edits to provide viewers with key information around topics in a matter of minutes.

Our content broke engagement records across events and has since been identified as being a clear focus of ongoing content strategies, while several organisations have approached us on the back of this work to understand if we can help them in similar ways.